The Bakony and Balaton-felvidék Region in the Hungarian Open Air Museum in Szentendre
extract, Györgyi H. Csukás (Szentendre)

September 20, 2000, saw a kind of migration toward the Hungarian Open Air Museum in Szentendre: waves of people were heading there to see the newly added Bakony and Balaton-felvidék region, which had been hidden from view up to then. Officials and ordinary people from all over Veszprém County came in cars and on chartered buses. Villagers gathered under banners with the names of their communities emblazoned on them; they were also holding the Millennium Flags which had been presented to them in that Year of the Millennium-Hungary's 1000th year as a state. They all came home to Szentendre, since the new buildings featured their own homes: they discovered their own memories of the past there. As the one-time owners of the houses did not live to see this ceremony, their children, grandchildren, relatives, and neighbors came to represent them. They were all deeply moved to see the houses given new life here and looked excitedly for the belongings of their late parents and grandparents. Numerous communal buildings, once integral parts of village life, were also included in the new region, and these aroused particular interest. When they saw the communal well and the laundry, elderly people probably recalled how they used to carry water, wash the household linen, or give water to the animals, chores both tiring and joyful. Memories of the exhausting but uplifting work of making bread were perhaps called up by the watermill where the grain was ground and the stoves of the füstöskonyhák, literally, smoky kitchens, which had no chimney so that the smoke escaped through door or an opening in the roof.

Row of houses with stone walls. Photo: Péter Deim, Hungarian Open Air Museum in Szentendre.