Szentendre Ethnography Museum, Transylvanian Unit

Architect: Miklós Buzás
Text: Eszter Götz
Photos: Szentendre Ethnography Museum, Eszter Götz

More than 20 years of preparations, research, collecting materials and construction works preceded the opening of the new section presenting the architecture of Transylvania of the Open Air Museum of Szentendre in May. With this development, the area of the museum as well as its building stock has grown to 1,5 of its original dimensions, and also the focus of the institute has been significantly broadened: this is the birth of the new genre of an „urban open-air museum”. The traditional culture of Transylvania did not only present its characteristics in villages but also in towns and cities. This world has been disappearing as quickly as the minor settlements since the end of the 20th century. The management of the museum – reinterpreting the entire profile of the institution – made the right decision when planning to involve for the first time the culture of small towns as a heritage well worth preserving and presenting. The new unit of Transylvania thus contains a section of a village and a small town as well. Whilst the buildings of the former are mainly original stuctures, the small town features tend to be replicas as the houses exhibited here actually stand on their original sites – even though their majority in somewhat modified forms – in streets and squares of Târgu Mureș (Marosvásárhely), Târgu Secuiesc (Kézdivásárhely), Sfântu Gheorghe (Sepsiszentgyörgy) and Cristuru Secuiesc (Székelykeresztúr).

Leading architect: Miklós Buzás
Architects: Miklós Buzás, Zoltán Domján, Zsófia Farkas-Mezei, Ildikó Pollák, Piroska Szakáll, Anna Szuromi
Garden design: Lászlóné Jakab
Head curators: Miklós Cseri, Zsuzsanna Batári, Zsolt Sári
Head museologists: Erika Vass, Szandra Németh, Tamás Szegedi-Kloska
Exhibition installation: Heonlab, Xorxor Interactive
Main contractor: EBH Invest

Passage:
Architecture: Avant-Garde Architect Studio
Traffic infrastructure: FŐMTERV Ltd.
Main contractor: METO Építő Ltd.