Folia historica 25

I. A Magyar Nemzeti Múzeum és az 1956-os forradalom és szabadságharc emlékéve 2006-ban - Cs. Lengyel Beatrix (szerk.): Az 1956-os forradalom emlékei. Újszerzemények a Magyar Nemzeti Múzeumban, 2004-2006 című kiállításunk és a kiállítást megelőző gyűjtés - Balahó Zoltán: A Történeti Tárnak dokumentumot adományozók életrajzai

Relics of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. The Exhibition 'New Acquisitions at the Hungarian National Museum, 2004-2006' Summary Our exhibition commemorating the 50

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h anniversary of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, 5 October 2006-3 December 2006, acquainted the public with the best of the photographs, documents, and objects that had been purchased by or donated to the Hungarian National Museum during a two-year collecting work. Though the exhibition's intention was not to give a chronological or thematic account of the revolution, only to represent the result of our collecting; the abundant photographic material on the walls, the documents and the historically significant unique objects in the showcases gave a multifaceted and moving image of those historic days and the ensuing reprisal. The fifty-day-long exhibition was seen by more than 12,000 visitors, with those among them who had given their highly-prized relics to our museum. In the guestbook we had comments from the givers, the participants of the revolution, about forty school groups, a number of foreign tourists (who were given detailed information about the exhibits in English), and from the expatriates visiting Hungary. Surpassing the usual diversity of guestbooks, the entries of more than one hundred pages reflect a variety of points of view and moods, anger, joy, hope; which are all due to the fact that almost every commenter had some kind of a personal tie to the represented events, with different attitudes and knowledge. The article gives the descriptions and the stories of the exhibited objects, indicating the collection they were put into, as well as the biographies of the donators and sellers. 206