Postai és Távközlési Múzeumi Alapítvány Évkönyve, 1997
Rövid tartalmi összefoglaló angol nyelven
István Kurucz Foreword One thing that distinguishes mankind from the rest of the living world is possession of a conscious, coherently formulated history. We have a past independent of ourselves, allowing us to learn from our forefathers’ experience. It is instructive to toy for a moment with this idea, which shows how important a knowledge of the past is to us. What would happen to mankind if some world catastrophe destroyed this accumulated knowledge and experience, if there were no more teachers, museums, libraries, schools or universities? The chain of continuity would be broken. Everything would have to start all over again. The new generation would marvel at the odd object from our era that came to light, just as we do at the wonderful buildings of the Mayas or the Egyptians, with their unknown technologies. Let us hope there will never be such a catastrophe, so that we can continue to learn by building on our forefathers’ experience, work and knowledge. We Hungarians recognize that the future of mankind does not depend only on our activity. It also rests on the exemplary contributions to mankind’s development made by our many, many predecessors. This should encourage us to learn the past’s lessons, confirming the truth of Miklós Zrí- nyi’s judgement that ‘we are inferior to no other nation’ and Helmuth Karl von Moltke’s observation that ‘the fate of every nation lies in its own strength.’ Learning, the transfer of knowledge, requires a great many things, including places where objects and documents that bring the past alive can be interrogated, digested and prepared for display. The activities, discoveries, events and instruments of our time will be the past for future generations. We have a duty to collect, to make it easier, or rather feasible at all, for them to know their past, as we and our forebears know those that went before us, though often in a fragmentary fashion. The most important physical manifestation of this obligation is a museum store. Recent years have brought some improvement in the Postal Museum’s deplorable storage facilities. Adequate stores for collections were provided in 1995 by Antenna Hungária PLC and in 1997 by Matáv PLC. The cover of this book shows the second: the newly acquired museum depository in Kert köz, Budapest. I trust that the expansion of our storage facilities will be apparent in more material being displayed in our exhibition areas and the exhibits being changed more frequently, and in the scholarly activity and yearbook contributions of our museum staff. 243
