Néprajzi Múzeum Budapest
Néprajzi Múzeum Budapest
We are delighted to welcome the Néprajzi Múzeum Budapest as a participant of the WanBel global project.
The Néprajzi Múzeum (Museum of Ethnography) in Budapest, Hungary, is a national museum founded in 1872 as the Ethnographic Department of the Hungarian National Museum.The museum stands as a major cultural hub, recently moving into a striking new building in Budapest's City Park, which opened in 2022. The architectural design consciously blurs the lines between landscape and structure, creating bright, open spaces that invite visitors to engage deeply with human stories from across the globe. The museum offers immersive exhibitions and public spaces that celebrate the shared and diverse cultural heritage that enriches human experience.
The museum holds a significant collection of artifacts from Papua New Guinea, reflecting the artistry and craftsmanship of the region. This Oceania collection includes many objects collected over a century ago by Hungarian explorers and ethnographers like Samuel Fenichel and Lajos Bíró.
For more information see the website
The museum website has a wealth of information online about the collection
Information on the Lajos Bíró collection
https://biro.neprajz.hu/english.start.php
There is a large database of the collection and the photograph collection.
Collection https://collection.neprajz.hu/neprajz.01.01.php?bm=2&kv=4898987
Photographs https://collection.neprajz.hu/neprajz.06.10.php?bm=2&kv=4898988
The museum regularly presents deeper analysis of works for the collection, such as this feature on a bowl from the Tami Islands collected in the 1890’s
https://neprajz.hu/en/gyujtemenyek/artefact-of-the-month/wooden-dish-from-new-guinea.html
“It is only in the mirror of our neighbours, relatives, and the rest of the world that even the most beautiful Hungarian collection can reflect a true, scientific picture, and not a misleading one.”
Museum Director Vilibáld Semayer, 1913
As one of the earliest ethnographic museums in Europe, the Museum of Ethnography has been collecting, archiving, preserving, researching, and transmitting the traditional and modern cultural artefacts of Hungarian, European, and world communities since 1872. The museum is a collection of objects, images, textual material, audio recordings, and thoughts that serves as a rich and multi-faceted resource for learning about the world.
learn more: https://neprajz.hu/en/kulturstrategia