Founded in 1802, the Hungarian National Museum is Hungary’s oldest museum. Due to the government’s plans to modify and develop Hungary’s network of cultural institutions, the museum has been officially merged into the newly established Hungarian National Museum Public Collections Center on July 1. Several of the museum’s affiliates, including the Museum of Applied Arts (Budapest), Hungarian Natural History Museum, Hungarian Museum of Trade and Tourism, Petőfi Literary Museum, and National Széchényi Library, have also been integrated into the Public Collections Center and will continue to operate as member institutions.
Szilárd Demeter, Director-General of the Hungarian National Museum Public Collections Center, has indicated that the mission of the new institution is to “to strengthen Hungarian identity, to foster a freedom of somewhere, in contrast to the boundlessness of freedom anywhere, thus establishing our own reality.” He said that the creation of the new institution is not an end in itself, but is intended to enrich both Hungarian and universal culture, and as part of this, "Hungarians will not be viewed as an audience, but as a community; not as consumers of culture, but as carriers of culture.”
The Public Collections Center will also take part in the global cultural competition, which, according to Szilárd Demeter, does not focus on the present or solely on Hungary for Hungarians: "The stakes of the competition lie in whether our nation will survive a hundred years from now in Europe as a culture rooted in the Hungarian language." The operating principles of the new Public Collections Center are based on the realization that "our present is both a present of the past and a present of the future," while "we will not forget to live as contemporaries of our own time."
Source: Kultura