About the collection
At the last official count conducted on June 1, 2003, the Pottery Collection, one of the museum's largest, tallied a total of 23,759 objects.
Despite its official title, the collection comprises not only pottery, but also various other silicate-based products made or used in the Carpathian Basin (Historical Hungary), including ceramic stove tiles (2150 items), factory-made earthenware and porcelain (1233 items), tin-glazed faience (about 1600 items), salt-glazed stoneware (about two dozen pieces), and glassware (about 500 items).
Also belonging to the collection are 34 examples of what have been termed "patience bottles," miniature scenes, generally on the theme of mining, painstakingly assembled and displayed in a bottle. The greater part of the collection, however, consists of traditional works of pottery. The exact number of artefacts in the collection will only be known when the full audit begun in 2001 is finally completed.
Work on the collection was started by the first director of the museum, János Xántus (with the help of Flóris Rómer), who personally collected items for an exhibition in Vienna in 1873. Another focus of these collectors was the assembling of material for the Ethnographic Village Exhibition on display during the Hungarian Millennial Celebrations in 1896. Most of the items collected for the exhibition later found their way into the storerooms of the Museum of Ethnography.
Because most researchers tended to focus their investigations on the more exotic peripheral areas of historical Hungary, such as Transdanubia, Transylvania, and Northern Hungary (now Slovakia), the pottery centres of the Great Hungarian Plain in the centre of the country were not discovered until the 20th century. After World War II, collecting work was launched with renewed intensity, resulting in the addition of several hundred artefacts per year. It was during this period that Mária Kresz, avid collector, nationally recognised ethnographer and ceramics expert, and curator at the museum for almost 40 years, created the storage system still used today, based on a book co-written by Mária Igaz entitled A népi cserépedények szakterminológiája, or The Terminology of Folk Pottery. The system involves sorting items first by form and size, then by place of origin. Items are also stored in various ways depending on which method will best serve preservation of the object, while optimising the use of storage space.
The curator of the collection is Dr. Gabriella Vida