Having been destroyed not once, but three times, it’s a wonder that the collection is still thriving today at the Natural History Museum in Budapest after more than its fair share of trials and tribulations.
The museum began more than 200 years ago when Count Ferenc Széchenyi established the National Széchenyi Library, which was the foundation for both the National Museum and the Natural History Museum. To get the ball rolling, his wife donated her mineral collection to the museum. In the beginning, the two museums were housed in one building, but not for long. But before it became its own museum, the first tragedy struck as a great flood in Pest destroyed much of the natural history collection.
Those who ran the collections boldly continued to collect specimens and artifacts, and by 1933, the Hungarian Natural History Museum was set up. Only 10 years later, the second devastation; during WWII, the most valuable objects from the collections and libraries were sent to the countryside for safekeeping, where one by one they were destroyed. Just over 10 years after that, during the 1956 uprising, an extensive fire damaged the mineralogical, zoological and paleontological collections and the Africa exhibition.
It’s almost hard to believe that there’s anything left in this museum, it’s so disaster prone, but this couldn’t be farther from the truth. A valiant effort to keep the museum ever-growing puts the collections of the Hungarian Natural History Museum as the 5th largest in Europe. Countless personal collections were donated, and Zsigmond Széchenyi himself made a game-hunting expedition to Africa to replace what was lost during the 1956 revolution. In the 60s and 70s, museum researchers made frequent trips to countries like North Korea, Vietnam, Cuba and Mongolia, resulting in an incredibly diverse collection of flora and fauna.
The museum recently found a new home in the Ludovika Academy, originally built to house the Military Academy of Hungary. Renovations are still taking place, but there is plenty to see in what is finished. The museum has a wonderful collection of taxidermy from around the world, including an extensive display of birds. Some favorites are a prehistoric skeleton of a giant deer and a pair of polar giants: a walrus and polar bear. The Carpathian Basin display, which depicts fish swimming underfoot as you walk across a glass floor, is also quite unique.
But if giant deer skeletons don’t entice one to visit, the temporary exhibition (up only until November 19th) on loan from Argentina is definitely worth the price of admission. The Patagonia region of Argentina is well-known for its dinosaur bones – roughly 10% of the world’s dinosaurs have been found there. And in 1993, an extraordinary discovery was made, by the name of Giganotosaurus. The name pretty much says it all; the Giganotosaurus is now the largest known carnivorous dinosaur in the world, beating even that king of dinos, the T-Rex, in size. Children and adults alike can marvel at his ‘Giganto’ skeleton along with a ‘Rebbi’ (Rebbachisaurs), one of the largest herbivores. He is 17 meters long and probably weighed around 10 tons. A favorite of children during my visit was the claw of a Megaraptor, which is the largest claw ever discovered from a raptor.
The museum is packed with clever interactive stations for children, and most of the exhibits are aimed at a young crowd, but there is more than enough to delight adults, from the towering model of a wooly mammoth to that most enormous of meat eaters, the Giganotosaurus.
Address: 1083 Budapest, Ludovika tér 2-6
Hours: Wednesday-Sunday 10:00 – 17:00
Website: www.nhmus.hu
Admission: Patagonia Exhibit – 1300 Ft
Michelle Enemark is a contributing writer and photographer devoted to unearthing and documenting the wondrous, the obscure and the macabre from around the globe. To read and view more of her work, visit www.curiousexpeditions.org and her Flickr site.
