Ethnographic Museum

It was founded as the Ethnographic Department of the Hungarian National Museum in 1872. Its first director was John Xantus de Vesey. It formally split from the National Museum in 1947.

Despite the Museum of Ethnography’s status as an institution of rank and prestige, the past 150 years of its history have been largely determined by a continuous struggle to maintain its facilities and keep its collections safe. Founded in 1872 as part of the Hungarian National Museum, the institution received its first independent home in 1892 in the form of the neo-Renaissance Várkert Bazár building near Budapest’s Castle District. A year later, however, inadequate conditions forced it to move to an apartment building in Csillag utca. It was in this location that, in 1898, its first permanent exhibition was born. Though in 1906, the museum was once more moved to the Millennial Exhibition’s then-empty Hall of Industry, in 1924, storm damage to its collection prompted yet another relocation, this time to an empty secondary school building on Könyves Kálmán út in Budapest’s Tisztviselőtelep neighbourhood . In 1929, the museum again opened its doors, its extraordinarily diverse and colourful collections on Hungarian folk and world cultures displayed across thirty of the school’s rooms. Decades later, in 1975, the museum moved into the palatial Hall of Justice opposite the building of the Hungarian Parliament.

Wikipedia