The Szentendre Open-Air Museum of Ethnography
Miklós Cseri (Szentendre)

Founded on February 1, 1967, the museum of folk culture in Szentendre is the second-largest ethnographic museum in Hungary. Initially, the outdoor complex was run as a department of the Hungarian Museum of Ethnography. In 1972, however, it became an independent national institution, authorized to build its collection from all over the country.

The Kisalföld, with the village church of Mosonszentjános (Gyôr-Moson-Sopron County) in the foreground. Photo: Péter Deim, Szentendre Open-Air Museum of Ethnography.

The museum was founded with a view to presenting to the public the folk architecture, home interiors, occupations and lifestyles typical of the peasantry of Hungary's villages and the craftsmen of its market towns, using only original samples for the exhibits, the buildings themselves being mid-eighteenth to mid-twentieth century structures relocated to the Szentendre site.
Long-term plans call for locating over 350 buildings on the museum site, grouped to represent nine different regions: the Felsô-Tiszavidék; Upper Hungary (Felvidék); Northern Hungary; the Central-Tisza region; the Great Plain (Alföld); the Southern Dunántúl (Transdanubia); the Balaton-felvidék; the Western Transdanubia (Dunántúl); and the Kisalföld. Each of the nine sets of buildings will be arranged to reflect the traditional layout of the villages of that particular region: some representative peasant homes (the house, barn, tool shed, etc. arranged in the pattern typical of the region), a church, commercial buildings (general store, smithy, workshops), and communal facilities (school, fire station, communal well). To date, three of the planned building complexes have been completed-the Felsô-Tiszavidék in 1974, the Kisalföld (1987), and Western Transdanubia (1993); the construction of the Great Plain market town is well on its way. An outdoor "Stations of the Cross", a cemetery with traditional carved tombstones, and several mills and wineries help make the Szentendre complex a "living" museum of folk culture and social history.

Western Transdanubia. Photo: Péter Deim, Szentendre Open-Air Museum of Ethnography.

As compared to its Scandinavian and Western European counterparts, the Szentendre Open-Air Museum of Ethnography is a rather recent institution. This very recency, on the other hand, has enabled its curators to avoid certain of the pitfalls that have beset some of the earlier museums of its kind, pitfalls having to do with the historical authenticity of the ethnographic samples, and the relocation and reconstruction of the selected buildings (the Szentendre museum uses only contemporary building techniques and materials).
Indeed, historical and ethnographic authenticity is the principal professional criterion behind everything that has gone into the building of the Szentendre outdoor museum complex. The first phase of the work was to identify the various types of dwellings found throughout the Hungarian-speaking parts of Eastern Europe, and register the regional variations, the building trends which started to unfold around the turn of the eighteenth century, and came into full flower a hundred years later. It is, essentially, the most typical regional variants of the village and market-town architecture of the nineteenth century and the fin-de-siecle that have been put on display in the Szentendre Open-Air Museum. The arrangement of the buildings reflects the settlement structure typical of the particular region, with the peasant dwellings being rebuilt not in isolation, but as they originally stood: as part of a coherent complex which included barns, work sheds, and other auxiliary structures. Each and every dwelling has been furnished with period furniture, tools, textiles, everyday objects and objects for festive occasions, according to the occupation, social status, religious affiliation, and ethnicity of the inhabitants. The museum, thus, is not just a collection of buildings, but a cross-section of life as it was lived at a particular time in a particular village or market town, the homes being furnished with the tools of the "owner's" particular craft or trade, as well as with the customary utensils of the family's day-to-day rituals (baking bread, doing the laundry, serving family meals, holding wakes, singing dirges, and so on).

The Felsô-Tiszavidék, Greek Catholic church and cemetery. Photo: Péter Deim, Szentendre Open-Air Museum of Ethnography.

The authenticity of the exhibition necessarily entails the use of authentic materials and building techniques. The selected buildings have been installed in the museum not in the condition in which they were found, but reconstructed in the form they had at a specified point of time, using the materials that were then in use. We have had to strip away the alterations and the parts that were tacked on, and have restored each building to its original size, form and structure. Termite-infested and disintegrating wooden structures have been replaced with beams of the same wood as was originally used, the units cut to the same size, finished the same way, and installed using the original technology.
Furnishings are another important component of historical and ethnographic authenticity. Unlike earlier open-air museums in Scandinavia and Western Europe, the Szentendre museum complex has every one of its buildings furnished. The furniture, the textiles (curtains, pillows, bedspreads, tablecloths), tools and household utensils, storage bins and baskets, doors, windows, stoves and even kindling wood all dress up the building, and make for a "lived-in" look. The furnishings always reflect primarily the ethnic and religious affiliation of the "householder", his social standing, and occupation. The objects are grouped as they would be for some special family occasion, and identify the kind of cottage industry the family might be engaged in. The kitchens contain clues as to how food was prepared and how raw materials were processed-indeed, every artifact in the house is placed with a view to revealing something about how its inhabitants lived their day-to-day lives.
Authenticity characterizes also the layout of each of the completed representative village complexes. The settlement structure of the villages and market towns of Hungary was determined by a variety of historical, geographic, social and other factors. Every settlement, however, erected buildings to meet the community's various needs: there were sacral edifices (church, belfry, chapel, Stations of the Cross, shrines, synagogue, temple, etc.); educational facilities (school, kindergarten); and other communal facilities (town hall, parsonage, communal well, laundry, fire station, general store, pub, post office, etc.). Only by relocating these, too, to the Szentendre museum site can we give a true picture of the Hungarian village of the turn of the century.

The Felsô-Tiszavidék: Houses from Botpalád and Kispalád (Szabolcs-Szatmár-Bereg County). Photo: Péter Deim, Szentendre Open-Air Museum of Ethnography.

The last decades have given us some proficiency in relocating buildings earmarked for inclusion in the open-air museum. Ethnographers and architects do a great deal of rigorous research prior to the actual move, once a building has been selected in keeping with the museum's basic scientific program. It is in keeping with these research findings that the building is disassembled, its components are documented, and transported to the museum site. What we find in the course of taking apart the building is at the heart of the detailed blueprint on the basis of which the building will be reconstructed; it is also the grounds for planning its furnishing, and for projecting the cultural and/or educational uses to which the building and its immediate environment can be put. Only in the light of all this is the building reassembled at the appropriate location on the museum site, conserved, and furnished with restored and conserved artifacts, ready to receive visitors to the museum, the tangible witness to the culture and customs of a bygone age.
The Szentendre Open-Air Museum of Ethnography was reclassified as a research center in 1981. Eleven volumes of its scholarly yearbook, Ház és Ember [House and Man], have appeared to date. We have held a series of international conferences, and published the papers presented under the following titles (which, incidentally, have become veritable handbooks of folk architectural research): Népi építészet a Kárpát-medence északkeleti térségében [Folk Architecture in the Northern Carpathian Basin]. 1989; A Dél-Dunántúl népi építészete [The Folk Architecture of Southern Transdanubia]. 1991; A Kisalföld népi építészete [The Folk Architecture of the Kisalföld]. 1993; A Nyugat-Dunántúl népi építészete [The Folk Architecture of Western Transdanubia]. 1995; and A Balaton-felvidék népi építészete [The Folk Architecture of the Balaton-felvidék]. 1997. The museum also gives a regular accounting of the details of the work being done in its popular scholarly periodical, the TÉKA.
In recent years, there has been growing focus on art and craft workshops and folklore programs complementary to the permanent exhibits. Every attempt is being made to present educational programs which every age group will enjoy.
Visitors to the Szentendre open-air museum will find brochures and guided tours available in three languages. No effort is spared to communicate, as clearly as possible, the wealth of knowledge and information that our exhibits represent.

We now have a restaurant, a pub, a general store and souvenir shops within the museum grounds. The parking lot has been enlarged, and the new entrance to the museum opens onto a spacious park, where there is ample room to rest a bit between doing "the rounds". One needs at least six and a half hours to see the entire museum. Today, our visitors can enjoy the exhibits at their leisure, taking advantage of all the facilities that museum goers everywhere expect to have provided for their comfort and convenience.