One of Transylvania’s Most Important Monuments Restored

Ground floor hallway of the renovated Palace of Culture

The renovated Palace of Culture in Târgu Mureș (Marosvásárhely, present-day Romania), one of the most important monuments in Transylvania, was inaugurated on Thursday. The palace has been completely renewed after four years of renovation and restoration works.

Speaking at the bilingual handover ceremony in the renewed Hall of Mirrors in the Art Nouveau Palace, Ferenc Péter, President of the Mures County Assembly, responsible for the building, explained: “The Palace of Culture is perfect as it was dreamed and built for us over a hundred years ago by Mayor György Bernády. All we have to do is to take care of it, to preserve its centuries-old patina, and to make the necessary changes to it in accordance with the needs of today.” The renovation of the exhibition spaces is still ongoing and the works are being financed by the County Assembly itself. The work will be completed this year, so that the building can be used in its entirety, he promised.

In his speech, Koppány Bulcsú Ötvös, Director of the Mures County Museum, recalled that the beauty of Târgu Mureș’s “trademark” has been praised by the Viennese newspapers, while art historians consider it an outstanding work of Central European Art Nouveau. He underlined that

the original functions of the building have been largely preserved, and that it currently houses a museum, a library, and a philharmonic orchestra.

The director stressed that it is a shared responsibility to fill the building with content and make it an attractive destination “for locals, Hungarians, and foreigners.”

The inauguration ceremony was followed by a bilingual guided walk. The building opened to the public on Thursday evening with a concert by the Târgu Mures State Philharmonic Orchestra.

The main façades of the building, the external windows, the electrical equipment of the main entrance, and the courtyard fence of the county library were renovated. The roof structure was also repaired, and the damaged tiles, cone tiles, and pinnacles were replaced with ceramic elements made by the Zsolnay Porcelain Manufactory of Pécs (southwestern Hungary), which were made identical to the original. The metal decorative elements and inscriptions on the façade, the external stone elements, and the mosaics were also restored.

The façade of the three-story palace, built between 1911 and 1913 from designs by Marcell Komor and Dezső Jakab, is decorated with a mosaic by Aladár Körösfői-Kriesch entitled The Apotheosis of Hungarian Culture. The bronze reliefs above the four entrance doors depict Hungarian composer Ferenc Liszt, the legend of St. Elizabeth, Hungarian mathematicians Farkas Bolyai and János Bolyai, writer György Aranka and the founding of the first Language Society, and an image from Ferenc Erkel’s opera Bánk bán.

The Hall of Mirrors is considered the most spectacular part of the palace, decorated with 12 stained glass windows depicting typical images of Szekler folklore and folk ballads.

Via MTI, Featured image: MTI/Kiss Gábor