Memorial rooms in Szekszárd
The passionate make museums
MúzeumCafé 26.
In Szekszárd’s Babits Mihály Street there is a literary-artistic ‘memorial house complex’ belonging to the nearby Mór Wosinsky County Museum. The Mihály Babits Memorial House, the Miklós Mészöly Memorial House, the István Baka Memorial Room and the Valéria Dienes Memorial Room – their apparently different oeuvres go well together. And another important matter is reflected by this – the town authorities have always been open, accepting each heritage, identifying with and inserting it into the collective memory. Each memorial house or room reflects the efforts of a passionate person, such that individual initiatives have produced a collective result. The central core itself, the county museum, developed in such a manner. Mór Wosinsky, a Catholic priest interested in history and archaeology, began excavations in Tolna county without any expertise, but with persistent endeavours he reached a level of knowledge such that from a village priest amateur he became one of Europe’s most renowned researchers of pre-historic times. The excavations of a Turkish fortification beside the village of Lengyel have since become an internationally famous neolithic site, acknowledged in the archaeological literature. Wosinsky’s sponsor, the enlightened, European-minded local landowner, Count Sándor Apponyi, supported him when he decided to establish the county’s first independent museum in Szek-szárd to display the accumulated finds. Not being satisfied with the temporary solution of using some rooms in the recently built local grammar school for exhibition purposes, he utilised the enthusiasm and prosperity manifested at the turn of the century to ensure the completion in 1901 of a neo-Renaissance museum building in the centre of Szekszárd, which today is Hungary’s only county museum originally constructed for that function.