Hungarian museum gardens
MúzeumCafé 4.
It would be nice to walk along Baroque avenues or converse about fountains and beautifully trimmed bushes by the winding paths of landscape gardens, yet we keep having to avoid parked cars, cyclists, dogs off the leash and dried-out ponds in the capital’s historical gardens – by the National Museum, the Castle Museum and the Kiscell Museum, while a most cathartic experience faces us in the garden of the Jewish Museum. Asking Ferenc Dávid, senior member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences’ Fine Arts Institute, to mention some classical museum gardens he immediately referred to the New York Cloisters, where a complete French medieval monastery has been created. In Hungary there are few gardens which have an integral museum function, though some can be found – the Lenck villa in Sopron, for example, where Renaissance and Baroque tombs were collected in the garden of the late 19th-century building and which have all been restored. The historic, 17-18th century Gombos gardens in Sárospatak are more authentic and plans have been made to reconstruct them. Ferenc Dávid believes that the park surrounding the Kiscell Museum could also be a museum garden. After all, a former owner, Miksa Schmidt, had a Romantic landscape park created here at the beginning of the 20th century.