The new home of the Museum of Ethnography, in the green heart of Budapest’s City Park, will be completed in 2021 as part of the Liget Budapest Project. Currently, the museum is closed to visitors, but is still operating behind closed doors as the employees prepare the artifacts of the museum for re-location.
Although the museum is currently closed to visitors, there are still many interesting, behind-the-scene happenings at the old location opposite to the Parliament. The museum now released a video with English subtitles, which summarizes this special time and gives a little insight to anyone who is interested in following events as they unfold and shape the museum’s history.
Though from the outside, the current building seems peaceful, inside, preparations for transporting the museum’s numerous artefacts are in full force, including former exhibition spaces. Each article must be picked up, cleaned, identified, and photographed. The scale of the job is difficult to imagine: some 250,000 artefacts and over a million archived documents, photographs, and photographic negatives must all be moved during the period to come.
Our institution closed its doors to the public in December of 2017. In the past year and a half, our staff have handled nearly 200,000 of the museum’s artefacts
notes museum director Lajos Kemecsi.
According to current plans, the new Museum of Ethnography will open in 2022, the 150th anniversary of the East Asian field trip taken by János Xántus (the museum’s first director), which produced the institution’s first collection. The design of the exciting new building has won two International Property Awards in the categories of best public service architecture in Europe, and best public service architecture, globally.