A gyűjtemény leírása
Given the physical impossibility of reproducing the complete peasant home and accompanying outbuildings often seen in open air museums within the walls of a city museum, the Museum of Ethnography's special collection of artefacts on traditional building construction has been limited to smaller representative objects, many of which are used in the construction of other exhibits.
Items include construction accessories, doors and windows, beams, locks, ironwork, various decorative pieces (such as decorative façade ironwork), and the maquettes that graced early peasant gates. With its some three hundred pieces, the building construction collection forms one of the Museum of Ethnography?s smaller offerings.
The history of the collection can be separated into three periods, the first of which began with the formation of the Ethnographical Department and lasted until the outbreak of the First World War. This period was a significant one for the collection as the time when the most valuable pieces and sets of objects were acquired, including three complete Transylvanian gateway structures (one from Székelyfancsal in Udvarhely County in 1911 and two others from Mikháza in Maros-Torda County and Dálnok in Háromszék County in 1913).
During the period between the two world wars, the number of pieces acquired by the collection dropped off considerably. After the end of the Second World War, however, the Ethnography Department separated from the National Museum to become a fully independent institution, the Budapest Museum of Ethnography. It was at this time that the material owned by the museum was organised into various collections, a system that had been planned at the end of the 1930's and is still used today. It was at this time that material related to peasant home construction, originally placed under the heading of "Settlements and Buildings," was organised into a separate collection within the Hungarian Department.
In terms of its plans for expanding the collection, the museum hopes in the future to concentrate on documentation rather than the acquisition of new objects, adding written records on groups of side buildings, village gates, streets, parts of villages, and buildings on the periphery of towns. A separate task would consist in the analysis of the general architectural appearance of the holiday and recreational areas that have arisen in the last 40 years. In general, the museum seeks to continuously identify changes in general architectural culture, including such areas of interest as:
The development of traditional peasant homes in accordance with changing fashions and ways of living, Changes in the appearance of and relationship between the parts of buildings that are used on a day-to-day basis and those that are maintained primarily for show, Changes in the general architecture of streets and rows of buildings to reflect altering trends toward an integrated appearance and the expression of individuality.
The curator of the collection is György Máté.