On the occasion of the 30th anniversary of its founding and registration, the Pulszky Society held a ceremonial general assembly on the morning of 16 September 2021 in the Ceremonial Hall of the Hungarian National Museum. At the end of the nearly one-year series of programs, the members of the organization and the invited guests remembered the inaugural general assembly held on December 5, 1990, and the fact that the association was registered by the Metropolitan Court of Budapest on April 16, 1991. The Pulszky Society, with a membership of more than a thousand people, is a key participant in the professional life of Hungarian museums, and its wide-ranging activities and history can be discovered in detail on our page.
The attendees of the even were welcomed by László L. Simon, Director General of the Hungarian National Museum and dr. Ibolya Bereczki, president of the (Pulszky) Society. After that, dr. Péter Fülöp Deputy State Secretary for Art, Public Education and Public Collections (EMMI); Hajnal Kassai, Head of Department (EMMI Museum Department); Benedek Varga, Chairman of the Hungarian National Committee of ICOM, dr. Júlia Fabényi, President of the Association of National Public Collections and dr. Andrea Csapláros, President of the Association of Hungarian Rural Museums, shared their thoughts on the anniversary.
The 2021 awards of the organisation were also handed out at this celebratory event.Honorary President dr. Péter Deme and Mihály Kurta, the founder and former head of the Museum Andragogy Department, both received an István Éri award in recognition of their work for the Society. One of the most prestigious awards in the museum profession, the Ferenc Pulszky Prize, was awarded to dr. Edit Hortiné Bathó, director of the Jász Museum (Jászberény) and Judit Walterné Müller, historian of the Janus Pannonius Museum in Pécs. This year, the Károly Pulszky Prize for people under the age of forty was awarded to three people: Csaba Hajagos (József Katona Museum in Kecskemét), Mihály Huszár (Marcali Museum) and dr. Szandra Németh (Open - Air Ethnographic Museum). The morning program was concluded with professional presentations by the previous year’s winners. In the afternoon, the founders, past and present leaders of the Society, as well as award-winning professionals from the past decades exchange ideas at a meeting with friends at the Corvin Hotel in Budapest.
On the previous afternoon in the Fiumei Road Cemetery of Budapest, with the speech of Benedek Varga, the attendees commemorated the two namesakes of the Society, the outstanding personalities of Hungarian museum affairs, Ferenc Pulszky and Károly Pulszky. After that, they placed memorial wreaths of the Society on the tomb of the late director of the National Museum as a tribute.
A brief summary with resources and chronology of each year of the association became available every 10-12 days from 16 April 2020 to 23 March 2021 in the Pulszky 30 section of the society's reimagined website. From February to June 2021, the Society organized a ten-part series of professional webinars entitled Museum Perspectives, covering the most important issues of Hungarian museum affairs, which can be viewed on the website. In connection with the anniversary, the lexicon entitled Hungarian Museum Portrait Gallery, published in 2002, has become digitally available, and the second volume will soon be completed, which will include the lives and activities of approximately 500 late museum professionals. The magazine entitled Hungarian Museums, which was published in print between 1995 and 2008, can also be read digitally.
The society’s online journal of the same title, published since 2008, provides up-to-date and comprehensive information for the entire museum profession. Not only has the Pulszky Society renewed its social network over the past year, but after the transformation of the nomination system, the awarding of the Museum of the Year and Exhibition of the Year awards has become a more open process and has appealed to a wide range of audience interested in museums.
