The Hungarian Museum of Natural History ( Hungarian Magyar Természettudományi Múzeum ) is a museum in Budapest , founded in 1802. It has the largest collection of natural history in Hungary .
Hungarian Museum of Natural History | |
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Magyar Természettudományi Múzeum | |
Established | 1802 |
opening date | from 10 to 18 hours, except Tuesday |
Address | Budapest, VII of Louis 2-6. |
Director | |
Site | nhmus.hu/en |
Content
Museum History
Foundation
In 1802, Count Ferenc Secheni bequeathed his library and numismatic collection to create the foundation of the future Hungarian National Library and the scientific and educational center. These materials laid the foundation for the Hungarian National Museum ( Secheni National Library ). The collection of minerals of the count’s wife, Julianna Festetic, gave rise to a collection of materials from the museum’s natural history.
The museum received its first paleontological collections as a gift from Archduke Rainer in 1811, and in the same year the museum purchased the first zoological collection. At the end of 1818, Kitaybel Pal transferred the herbarium for 7000 forints to the museum, which marked the beginning of the Botanical Department of the museum [1] .
By 1848 - the time of Hungarian demonstrations against the Austrian Empire, the museum's collection totaled about 13,000 copies, its zoological collection - about 35,000 copies. The next most valuable acquisition of the museum in 1856 was the collection of the Royal Hungarian Society for Natural History.
Since 1870, the Hungarian National Museum has departments of zoology, botany and mineralogy. The size of the collections at the end of the nineteenth century exceeded 1 million copies.
Between World Wars
In 1927, the tenth World Congress of Zoology was held in Budapest, by this time the collection of insects in the museum amounted to about 3 million copies. The growing collections already had too little space in the museum and were partially housed in the new Museum of Natural History, founded in 1933.
Most of the museum’s botanical collections perished during World War II.
After World War II
Shortly after the war, the museum opened an anthropology department, which is currently one of the ten largest in Europe.
The department specialized in collecting and studying materials from Hungarian flora and fauna.
During anti-government protests in Budapest in 1956, an artillery shell hit the main building of the National Museum. The mineralogical and paleontological collection of the museum suffered from a shell rupture. During the rebellion, 100,000 volumes of scientific publications were burned, 36,000 stuffed birds, 13,000 fish, amphibians and reptiles, etc. were destroyed.
Several years later, Zsigmond Széchenyi undertook several expeditions to Africa to collect additional materials for the museum to compensate for the losses. In the 1960s and 1970s, museum workers traveled to the countries of the socialist camp — North Korea , Vietnam , Cuba, and Mongolia to collect a collection of the flora and fauna of these countries.
In 1979, the museum’s botany department moved to a historic building designed by Hungarian architect Odon Lechner .
Recent History
Until the early 1990s, in the Museum of Natural History, despite the constant growth of its collections, there was no separate exhibition space. The Hungarian government decided to move the museum to the building of the Academy of Louis: a historical monument built for the Hungarian Military Academy.
Currently, departments of anthropology, mineralogy and petrology, geology and paleontology are already located there. Collections of birds and mammals, collections of zoology, and the laboratory of molecular genetics were also located there.
The zoological collection of the museum is the fifth largest in Europe and has about 7 million samples of invertebrates and vertebrates. In the lobby of the museum there is a 20-meter finale skeleton (Balaenoptera physalus).
Museum Structure
The museum consists of the main departments:
- Department of Anthropology;
- Department of Zoology;
- Department of Botany;
- Department of Mineralogy and Petrology;
- Department of Geology and Paleontology;
- Library.
Publications
The museum publishes literature on its subjects, four periodicals, including the Acta Zoologica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae [2] .
Literature
- István Matskási: Das neue Naturwissenschaftliche Museum, Gutenberg Press, 1999.
Links
Notes
- ↑ Ungarisches Naturwissenschaftliches Museum , museum.hu, abgerufen am 15. April 2012.
- ↑ Acta Zoologica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae