Heritage of bishops and archbishops
Museum of the Eger Archiepiscopal Collections
MúzeumCafé 15.
The foundation of the institution is directly connected to the name of the Venetian patriarch János László Pyrker, who arrived in Eger in 1827 to take over the archbishop’s see. With him came his collection of 190 works of art, comprising mainly high-quality Venetian paintings. He extended the Archbishop’s Palace with a new wing in order to house his picture gallery, and today the museum operates there. Pyrker’s gallery could be first visited between 1828 and 1844; from 1836 it was acknowledged as the ‘picture gallery of the national museum’, since the archbishop had offered 140 items to the National Museum, which was about to be founded, and a further 50 paintings were added later. Today his donation is part of the collection of Old Master Paintings in Budapest’s Museum of Fine Arts. During and after the Second World War the museum was closed for security reasons. In the period between 1947 and 1950 the collection fell victim to nationalisation and to negligence. It was significantly damaged in 1950 when the National Centre of Museums and Listed Buildings ordered that the collection be handed over to the town’s public museum. Since no detailed and precise inventory was made, dozens of works disappeared while being transported over the barely 300-metre distance. An essential change in the museum only occurred with the changes of 1989-90. Reconstruction of the Archbishop’s Palace’s Pyrker wing began, with considerable support from tender application. There is every hope that renewal of the permanent exhibition will also take place. At the same time, due to continuously decreasing state subsidies, it is becoming difficult to increase the collection through purchases. However, help is coming from another direction.