Ethnographic collection

In 1954, the equipment of a gingerbread and candle-making workshop in Szentendre laid the foundation for the ethnographic collection, which today has more than 9,000 objects. It represents the lifestyle, clothing, and folk art of the Hungarian, Serbian, Romanian, German, and Slovak population living in the county. The ethnographic material consists of the textile, ceramic, furniture, household, and small-scale crafts collection, as well as the folk religiosity and naive art collections. The significance of the textile collection, which has the largest number of items, is given by the clothing ensembles and related object types, such as Serbian decorative scarves.

The furniture collection consists mostly of peasant and bourgeois furniture made from the mid-19th century to the 1940s, including a significant number of painted, dated peasant furniture. In addition to the decorated, year-old tools of the craftsmen, we preserve the tools and products of the gingerbread and candle-making, stonemasonry, blacksmithing, gypsy blacksmithing and shoemaking trades. The works of naive painters and folk artists living in Pest County can be found in the collection, as well as the religious relics and cult objects of the Catholic, Reformed and Orthodox population: holy images, statues, votive objects and indulgence relics from the 18th-20th centuries. The use of the objects, the lifestyle, clothing and customs of the residents are documented by rich archival photographs.