Six Unique Exhibitions Await Visitors at the Museum of Ethnography this Year

In a 21st century world that has become globalized to an unprecedented degree, it is important to showcase all that is unique, and this is what the Museum of Ethnography is undertaking, said the Deputy State Secretary for Public Collections and Cultural Development at a press event presenting the museum’s 2025 plans.

Máté Vincze pointed out at the event that last year marked a “turning point” for the Museum, with the opening of the permanent exhibition in the building that has won numerous international and national awards. Now the challenge for the institution is to maintain the high level of interest, the Deputy State Secretary said. He added that children and families are a particularly important target group for the Ministry of Culture and Innovation, and that the Museum of Ethnography offers a number of innovations in the field of museum education.

The Museum of Ethnography is preparing six new temporary exhibitions for 2025.

The first will open on January 22, the Day of the Hungarian Culture, and will focus on a Hungarian folk instrument, the zither (citera), until June 29. The Museum currently has around 3,000 folk instruments from all over the world in its various collections, with the temporary exhibition showcasing a wide range of zither types.

Photo: Wikipedia

The second temporary exhibition is titled “Hungary in Color. Hidden photographs from 1862,” and will be open from March 5 to September 15, 2025. The exhibition will focus on a series of photographs of folk costumes taken in contemporary Hungarian landscapes and settlements exhibited at the 1862 London World’s Fair.

The exhibition “Heavy Matter. Women – Costumes – Life Stories” will tell the story of the Danube Swabian girls and women from June 6, 2025 to January 31, 2026.

From September to March, the temporary exhibition “Mountain of Myths” will be on show, which will explore the ancient cultures of pre-Spanish Mexico, a world never seen in its entirety in Hungary.

The temporary exhibition “The World of the Blue Dyer’s ‘Patchwork Stain’ – The Hungarian Patchwork Guild” will be open from November 13, 2025 to February 1, 2026 and will present the history and work of the guild, based on the work of landscape architect and textile artist Anna Dolányi and her activities as a movement organizer.

Blue dyeing is a color patterning technique used on textiles. Blue-dyed textiles have played an important role in Hungarian folk costumes in the past centuries. Photo: Wikipedia

The sixth exhibition, “From the Queen’s Table to the Peasant’s Gate. The history of Hungarian leather-hard pottery” will cover almost two centuries of hard tile production and will be open from December 3, 2025 to July 26, 2026.

Lajos Kemecsi, Director General of the Museum of Ethnography, underlined the role of ongoing research that will lead to new exhibitions, publications and conferences.

It is important to see that in a modern museum, scientific research, conservation work, record-keeping, the preparation, planning and realization of exhibitions and the related dissemination activities are all interrelated. This is the complexity that characterizes the Museum of Ethnography and modern museums in general,”

he said, stressing that more than a dozen books are planned for publication this year. The Director General highlighted the “MaDok program,” which is the ethnographic museum’s research group on contemporary history and museology, and the “Katonadolog” research group, which explores the material, visual and written material related to the military service.

Museum of Ethnography Opens Exhibition on Szekler Heritage