Colonisation without colonies
Hungarian plans for ethnographic collection in the world and the Balkans
MúzeumCafé 38.
In October 1913 Vilibáld Semayer, director of the National Museum’s Ethnography Department, responded with a confidential proposal to an ordinance of the Ministry of Religion and Public Education, which had requested suggestions regarding the notion that the Balkans should look for the means of its cultural progress primarily in Hungary, that is Hungary should take the leading intellectual role in the region. Semayer’s plan shows that his ambitions were completely in line with the foreign policy conceptions of the decree. His aim was for the Ethnography Department of the National Museum to become “the principal museum of the Balkans”. Hungary’s foreign policy makers believed the time had come to refashion Hungarian science and within that the international role of Hungary’s museums and their rightful place within the Dual Monarchy. The outbreak of World War I did not put a brake on the conceptions, indeed it nourished them. In spring 1918 Serbian items taken to Budapest were exhibited as part of a military exhibition. Later they came under the custody of the Ethnography Department. In 1920 the Serbian war booty committee tried to get back the items. That they were not entirely successful is testified by a confidential report of Zsigmond Bátky, who assumed leadership of the department in 1919: “…we didn’t mention before the committee a superb collection of Albanian costumes …” The museum listed the attire in its inventory only in the 1960s, as material of unknown origin. Arguably, only this much remained of Vilibáld Semayer’s wide-ranging plans for developing the collection. Hungary’s participation in cultural colonisation drew to a close before it could really evolve.