Matskási István (szerk.): A Magyar Természettudományi Múzeum évkönyve 94. (Budapest 2002)

Matskási, I.: Bicentenary of the Hungarian Natural History Museum

Our collections remained within the confines of the National Museum for the time being. Botanical collections found their home in tenement flats in 1892, and then in 1905 - in the building of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. The Departments of Zoology, Mineralogy and Palaeontology were not moved from the National Museum, yet they hardly became any less packed. In 1902 the Department of Zoology alone comprised nearly 1 million items. The National Natural History Museum gained only partial independence in 1933. Although, as a result of specialisation, independent departments were formed under the names of Department of Mineralogy and Petrology, and Department of Geology and Palaeontology, they still remained within the confines of the National Museum. The other departments were not as 'lucky' as them. In 1926 the Department of Zoology had indisputably outgrown the space that was available for it, so was packed up and provisionally moved over to a nearby building. Chaired by GÉZA HORVÁTH, the internationally known department head (who was honoured by, inter alia, Hungarian, French, Egyptian, Brazilian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Austrian, German, Czech, Russian, Finnish, Croatian, and Chilean state and scientific certificates of merit), the 10th Zoological World Conference was organised and crowned with enormous success in Budapest in 1927. Maybe that was the reason why the Department of Zoology could find its permanent location and become richer and richer in 1928 in Baross utca - in a building erected with other functions in mind to begin with. By the beginning of World War II the entomological collections counted as many as three million specimens. In an effort to avoid war hazards, the valuable segments of the Department of Botany were fled - with the aim of safeguarding them - to the countryside in 1944-1945. By misfortune, the better part of the collections got destroyed there, while the materials left in Budapest did not suffer so much damage. The Department has moved twice ever since, today it is occupying the ex-building of the Széchenyi Grammar School. Right after World War II the Department of Anthropology was also founded, which moved into a onetime private villa in 1957. After the Second World War, at the turn of the 1940s and 1950s, botanical and zoological research intensified again; commissioned by the museum, university and research institutes as well as private researchers got involved in these efforts, too. The research of domestic flora and fauna - thanks to our researchers' major contributions within the scope thereof, too - has gathered momentum in the past decades. In 1956 our museum suffered maybe the heaviest blow of its history. On October 24 the building of the National Museum got shell-struck, and the famous Af-