Brief history
The museum dates its origins back to 1802 with the establishment of the Hungarian National Museum by Count Ferenc Széchenyi, who donated his1700 volume library, manuscript and coin collection as a gift to the Hungarian nation. In the same year, his wife made the very first natural history collection public that contained selected and valuable minerals from Hungary. In 1811 the first palaeontological and zoological collection found their way to the museum. Later on, in the age of the rising Hungarian bourgeoisie, and in line with rising patriotic feelings of the Hungarian Reform Era of the 19th century, the collections started growing relatively fast, thanks to donations and purchases.
1869 was the first year when the first data regarding the number of visitors were preserved; nearly 65000 people came to see the entire museum, with its history and art collections included.
Owing to the diversity of the ever-expanding material, the natural history collections had to be made independent of the National Museum. As a consequence, independent zoological, mineralogical and palaeontological, and botanical departments were founded in 1870. Thanks to the greater independence, more and more specialists joined the departments and the collections continued to grow even more intensely.
During the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 against the country’s communist regime and Russian occupation, the museum suffered its greatest losses of its history. Its famous Africa exhibition and the majority of the mineralogy and palaeontology collections were lost due to fire caused by an artillery-shot. The Department of Zoology, accommodated in a separate building, was also hit by a firebomb, and consequently hundreds of thousands of specimens perished.
In the following decades, the collection strategy focused on acquisition in order to rebuild the museum’s damaged collections and exhibitions. Several collecting trips were organized to Africa and distant Second World countries like North Korea, Vietnam and Mongolia. As a result, materials from these regions are the richest of their kind worldwide. Beginning from the 1980s more countries in Asia, Africa, South America, Australia and Oceania became available destinations for collecting trips.
In the middle of the 1990s, the Hungarian government decided to provide a permanent place for the natural history museum, and designated the building of its current location for its permanent exhibition and certain collections. According to plans of that time, all the collections would have been accommodated at one location by the end of 2000s. In 1996, our permanent exhibition of history and ecology, ’Man and Nature in Hungary’ was opened.
In 1999, a brand-new loft of the building was also opened for the public, and the Department of Anthropology together with three sections of the Department of Zoology, i.e. the collections of mammals and birds could occupy some of the most up-to-date museum premises of Europe. In 2010 our current permanent exhibition, ‘The Variety of Life’ was opened.
