Many cultural institutions responded quickly to the emergency caused by the coronavirus epidemic. In addition to making collections and virtual exhibitions available online, they also use educational materials to help students and teachers who are stuck within the four walls.
Let's start with the ancestor of every Hungarian museum, the Hungarian National Museum. OMMIK, a department of the museum, operates the MuseuMap service, the biggest Hungarian museum aggregation portal, which collects thousands of records from more than thirty museums across the country.
MuseuMap aggregation portal
You can visit the permanent exhibitions of the museum from your home and watch talks and short lectures on the Hungarian National Museum's own Youtube channel. The museum blog reports on interesting things like the work of archaeologists working in Egypt or what animal remains were discovered during the renovation of the Museum Garden.
Inside the permanent collection at the Hungarian National Museum
The Hungarian Museum of Technology and Transport has launched a new video series on its Youtube channel, where scientists, inventors and transport professionals tell about their lives, their work and showcase their creations and developments. In addition to two currently available virtual exhibitions, the museum will soon be launching another.
On the website of the Petofi Literary Museum you can visit the Petofi and Csáth exhibition halls online, the 2017 János Arany exhibition and the Magda Szabó exhibition.
Visit the Petofi Literary Museum virtually
The Museum of Ethnography launched a series of films on the museum's YouTube channel, known as Warehouse Tours and Days of Our Lives. In addition, the online collection is very spectacular: at present, there are nearly 100,000 works of art, over 12,000 pieces of sound material, mostly folk tunes, 11,450 drawings, paintings, postcards, nearly 40,000 photos and slides, 290 manuscripts to browse on your smartphone or tablet.
The Museum of Fine Arts in Budapes has a selection of twelve short films connected to the successful Rubens, Van Dyck and Flemish painting exhibition, as well as six short films from last year's Triumph of the Body - Michelangelo and the 16th Century Italian Art Exhibition.
The Kunsthalle has also made its current exhibitions - the Paolo Ventura Photo Exhibition, the Major Kamill Exhibition, and the Derkó 2020 Fine Arts Fellowship Show - available online.The exhibition in the Hungarian National Gallery called Variations for Realism - from Munkácsy to Mednyánszky can be visited virtually on the website of the institution.
Virtual Paolo Ventura exhibition at the Kunsthalle
The National Theatre History Museum and Institute's puppet collection is accessible here. The website dedicated to WWI theaters and war prison theatres, and 3D models of puppets, costumes, theatrical mock-ups and props is also worth a visit.
Every day, the Janus Pannonius Museum of Pécs shares some fun facts and behind-the-scenes information about the museum's collections, classes and earlier exhibitions. The series is called Roaming the museum.
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| The Royal Palace of Gödöllő, one of the most impressive baroque architectural heritage of Hungary, can be virtually visited from the basement to the attic. |
Ferenczy Museum Centre in Szentendre started the ‘Museum from your room’ campaign. The curators present interesting and valuable works from current exhibitions by Noémi Ferenczy, Béla Czóbel, János Kmetty and Margit Kovács. These contents are also published on the museum's Facebook and Instagram pages. The FMC YouTube channel features films and interviews with the curators, beautiful artwork and exciting discoveries of old and current exhibitions that cannot be visited due to the current situation.
Visit the Kuny Domokos Museum in Tata Castle for virtual collections. The museum called for community action to collect WWII pictures of old Tata struts and gates, and on their Facebook page they are collecting information about these. The castle can be virtually toured with a virtual tour.
Virtual 3D tour of the Tata Castle
Every week, the Damjanich János Museum in Szolnok publishes a video from "Our Favorite Works of Art" series, in which historians, archaeologists, researchers and curators talk about curiosities, paintings and events that are important for them.
Educational aids
The ever-expanding collection of the Hungarian National Museum include topics such as the Árpád Age, Western and Eastern Christianity, Sigismund of Luxembourg, János Hunyadi, King Matthias, Reformation, the Age of the Turkish Conquest, the 1848 revolution, Soviet forced labour camps and the Kádár era. A handbook for educators was published by the Hungarian National Museum to assist teachers in interpreting the exhibition at the Hungarian National Museum's Malenkij Robot Memorial and teaching the historical background of the period.
The Petofi Literary Museum, together with teachers, compiles its online curriculum for the quarantine. For this purpose, teachers can use digitalized materials from PIM collections (manuscripts, paintings, photos, audio, videos, objects).
On the Hungarian National Gallery's Masterpieces in Education section, we learn about ten important paintings through the requirements of the History, Hungarian Language and Literature, and Visual Culture curricula, together with ample background material and questions.