Postai és Távközlési Múzeumi Alapítvány Évkönyve, 1998

Rövid tartalmi összefoglaló angol nyelven

this black-and-white. But we have to develop a taste for museums among our young people, and museums must be granted a permanent place in their programme of activities. There is great truth in the saying that what little Johnnie does not learn, grown-up John will not know. People are unlikely to start visiting museums in adulthood, unless they are doing so for the benefit of little Johnnie.

However pleased we might be to receive many visitors to the museum and to Nagyvázsony from home and abroad, we would be happier with even more, or at least as many as a few years ago. This could also be said by most of Hungary’s 770 or so museums. They had 14 million visitors in 1990, but this number had gone down to 9.5 million by 1997. The largest number was received by the Ópusztaszer National Historical Memorial Park, and we hope that many of the 466,000 visitors took a look at our exhibition there. The Dobó István Castle Museum in Eger, the Benedictine Abbey in Tihany and the Transport Museum in Budapest also boasted a large number of visitors in 1997. The national indicator, the number of museum visits per 100 of population, had gone down to 93 from the 135 in 1990.

Ferenc Hernitz: The Sopron Post and Communications History Collection

Sopron can trace its postal history back to Roman times, to the Sopron postal station of the Cursus Publicus, followed some thousand years later by the horse relay station of the Habsburg post founded in 1550. Whereas the Hungarian post offices received their funds from the postmaster in Poszony (Bratislava), Sopron drew its income from the Lower Austrian authorities. In the 1700s it was subordinated to the Kőszeg Head Post Office, then came under the postal prefecture of Varasd in 1819 and Pozsony from 1823. The complete list of the town’s postmasters since 1695 is intact. Sopron lay firstly on the Vienna-Kanizsa postal route, then after 1695 the Vienna-Zagreb and Vienna-Constanti- nople routes. From the beginning of the 1700s a postal coach ran from Vienna to Kőszeg, and from 1804 from Vienna to Károly város. In autumn 1839 and spring 1840, Sándor Petőfi, serving as a soldier, guarded the Post Office. After Hungary’s defeat in the War of Independence, a Postal Administration was based in Sopron from 1 January 1850. Its initial area of operations covered the larger part of Transdanubia.

When posts and telegraphs were merged in 1887, the Pécs administration was set up partly out of the Pest, and partly the Sopron postal administrations. The Trianon peace treaty further reduced the administration’s area. Sopron only remained Hungarian through the loyalty of its citizens. The Sopron Postal Administration is the only one in Hungary which has remained in place for 150 years.

In 1960, Dr Sándor Mesterházy, retired post office director, undertook the research of Sopron’s postal history and the search for extant relics. Dr Mesterházy was bom in 1897 in Sopronkeresztúr (now Deutschkreitz). His father was the local postmaster, and so his interest in the postal heritage was aroused early. Following his retirement he devoted all of his time to setting up a local postal museum or collection in Sopron, and in due course he became museum curator, nurturing and augmenting the collection. He wrote many works and published numerous articles. He died at the age of eighty-three. Many of his dreams, if not all of them, came to fulfilment, and his achievement has been lasting. He traced and set down the history of the Sopron Postal Administration, and preserved for

257