Museum - Museum of Ethnography

The Museum of Ethnography is one of the oldest institutions in Hungary. It was founded as a subdivision of the Hungarian National Museum in 1872. Its first collection was the East Asian collection of János Xantus. From the 1890s the attention began to focus on the disappearing values of the Hungarian culture and that of our neighbors, relatives, and other continents. Today the museum has a collection of around quarter of a million objects. Among the scientist who worked for the museum we can mention: Béla Bartók, Zoltán Kodály etc.

The museum became an independent institution in 1947.

In 1924 the museum was placed into an olden Grammar school and stayed there for 50 years. In 1973 part of the ex Palace of Justice was assigned to it.

Nowadays the Museum of Ethnography has one of the biggest collections in Europe with its library and archives.

Temporary exhibitions

2024.10.15. - 2025.08.31.

Székelys

Patterns of Heritage

Who are the Székelys really? What do we know about Székely Land? What ideas and beliefs do we have about the Székely people? What is the reality? How do the people of Székely Land see themselves?

2025.03.05. - 2025.09.15.

Hungary in Colour

Hidden Photographs from 1862

The exhibition presents a remarkable collection never before seen in Hungary, recently discovered by researchers. The focal point of the exhibition is a series of photographs showcasing traditional Hungarian folk attire from various regions and settlements, originally displayed at the 1862 International Exhibition in London. Thought to have been lost, the photographs by János Tiedge have been loaned from the collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.

further exhibitions

Permanent exhibitions

We Have Arrived

We Have Arrived covers over a century and a half of achievements, discussing everything from the 19th - century efforts that marked the museum’s inception to its very latest acquisitions. Notably, curators have not limited their sights to iconic artefacts: a majority of the more then a hundred items on display here have never before seen the world outside museum storage.

Ceramics Space

Ceramics of the World

In the area corresponding to the left hemisphere, ceramics of the world are grouped logically, according to geographical area, ceramics centre, and shape, while the right hemisphere area offers an intuitive response to the myriad worlds of ceramics and explores their interconnections.

ZOOM: a Change in Perspectives

In the collection of the Museum of Ethnography are united more than two hundred thousand individual artefacts, along with several hundred thousand photographs, drawings, manuscripts, audio recordings and films. Here, in the ZOOM exhibition space, this monumental body of material appears in its primordial state, the cast out flotsam of a museal Big Bang.

Digital remix

further exhibitions