A Móra Ferenc Múzeum Évkönyve: Studia Ethnographica 3. (Szeged, 2001)

Nagy Vera: Az 1904-es ipari és mezőgazdasági kiállítás Hódmezővásárhelyen

Kiss LAJOS É. n. Emlékezések a hódmezővásárhelyi múzeum alapításáról. 1958 Kiss Lajos: Szőrös párnavégek Hódmezővásárhelyen. In: Vásárhelyi hétköznapok. Buda pest, 147-148. 1964 Vásárhelyi tálasok. In: Vásárhelyi kistükör. Budapest, 287-408. KOSA LÁSZLÓ 1981 Néprajzi Múzeum. Magyar Néprajzi Lexikon. 4. köt. Budapest, 10-13. NAGY VERA 1964 Vékony Sándor. Hódmezővásárhely. SAMU JÁNOS 1904 A hódmezővásárhelyi néprajzi kiállítás. Néprajzi Értesítő. 289-294. The 1904 Industrial and Agricultural Exhibition in Hódmezővásárhely In 1904 the leaders of Hódmezővásárhely decided to organise a large-scale industrial and agricultural exhibition. The well-organised and thoroughly documented exhibition gave a true picture of the town's economy at the time and those who took part in the organisation got an insight of the town's society. Based on the idea of the artists living here the economic description was complemented by an ethnographical and fine arts exhibition. The exhibition was dominated by the town's agrarian character but it also highlighted that the local industry did not succeed in utilising the opportunities provided by the agricultural production since agriculture was not accompanied by an up-to-date process industry. The processing of agricultural produce did not take place at all or happened only at a very low standard. The industry was not really developed and the crafts booming in previous century and satisfying the demands of the peasantry continued to live on in the twentieth century. Only a few fields of the industry could they manage to go beyond the limits of the small industry, mainly in the milling industry and brick production, both of which also dealt with export. The high standard cart manufacturing was due to the town's smiths and cartwrights, who, however, remained within the small industry and could only realise an elementary form of association. In the agricultural machine manufacturing industry only Zsigmond Kalmár'

s crop-purifying machine works lived up to the standards of its age. The brochure of the exhibition gives us an accurate picture of the animal husbandry of the time: the species that had been bred in the past centuries were still exhibited together with new species but these latter were still not widely used. Both the exhibition organisers and the press drew conclusions. They wrote the following about artisanship: „The financial state of our artisanship is modest, its initiative is little, and its style is oldfashioned..." The event's merit lay in the fact that it gathered all social classes from the poorest and showed them a realistic picture of the town's economic life and culture. The exhibition's long-term merit was that a long formulating idea of establishing a museum became a reality and after this Lajos Kiss - who later became an excellent ethnographer - commenced his ethnographical collection work, which served as a core for the ethnographical collection of the museum, which is now nearly a century old. 73