Museum of Ethnography (Budapest)

Despite the Museum of Ethnography's status as an institution of rank and prestige, the past 150 years of its history have been largely determined by a continuous struggle to maintain its facilities and keep its collections safe.

Founded in 1872 as part of the Hungarian National Museum, the institution received its first independent home in 1892 in the form of the neo-Renaissance Várkert Bazár building near Budapest's Castle District.

Though in 1906, the museum was once more moved to the Millennial Exhibition's then-empty Hall of Industry, in 1924, storm damage to its collection prompted yet another relocation, this time to an empty secondary school building on Könyves Kálmán út in Budapest's Tisztviselőtelep neighbourhood (Népliget).

In quantitative terms, the two biggest subgroups within the Asia Collection comprise objects originating from Japan and China, followed by India, the Amur region, Mongolia, Turkey, the Caucasus, and Turkestan.

Besides the tasks of conserving, researching, and presenting this important international material, the museum plays a key role in strengthening Hungarian national identity.

Through the tens of thousands of simple utilitarian and representative objects in its collections associated with traditional forms of subsistence (fishing, animal husbandry and herding, agriculture, and hunting and gathering), the museum illustrates the challenges people faced in the centuries before mechanisation, and the way of life in the fertile countryside criss-crossed by rivers.

Besides the folk costumes and household textiles of the peasants, craftspeople, and herders living in the villages and market towns, all of which were characterised by an extraordinary wealth of ornamentation, motifs, and colours, the collection also encompasses the material culture of the wider population, including the urban lower middle class and intelligentsia.

Their collecting work encompassed the musical traditions not only of Hungarians but also of other ethnic groups living in the Carpathian Basin, and, in Bartók's case, even extended to the Anatolian Turks and Algerian Arabs.

The 30,000-item Manuscript Collection and the drawings, paintings, and prints preserved in the Image Archive attract international researchers, whose work is also supported by the museum's specialist library, which boasts 197,000 volumes.