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The Oradea-based Cris Land Museum (MTC) opened on Wednesday the anniversary exhibition "150 Years of Oradea Museography" which will remain open to the public until May 15.
"Time goes by so fast ... Whereas a century and a half ago the beginnings were with very little resources but with lots of enthusiasm, today the Cris Land Museum has an enviable treasure trove, I'd say, being one of Romania's richest museums. We have almost 510,000 inventory items, heritage objects and clearly, resource-wise we are among Romania's top five museums and we won't stop here," MTC director Gabriel Moisa said during the opening event.
The exhibition curated by museographer Tiberiu Ciorba together with the colleagues from the history department includes objects from the old museum heritage related to the local Archeology and History Society, the volume "Museum Centennial" published on the 100th anniversary of museography in Oradea City, registers, documents, photographs, vintage images, interesting pieces from the Arnold Ipolyi (1823-1886) collection - one of the institution's oldest - various instruments belonging to museum sections. Also on display are a series of caricatures of museum staff drawn by Francois Pamfil in the 1970s.
A former MTC director for 27 years, art critic Aurel Chiriac told AGERPRES that this exhibition comes naturally, as an event meant to make contemporaries aware of the fact that Oradea has one of the oldest museums in Romania.
"The starting point of the museographic movement in Oradea is the year 1872 when, just like in other Transylvanian county residences, they founded those Archeology and History Associations whose statutory mission was to collect artifacts, documents, sources related to local history. More than 20,000 items were collected in just a few decades, until 1896, when a museum was opened in Oradea, in the present-day Children's Palace, on Museum Street," MTC director Gabriel Moisa told AGERPRES.
Following Oradea and Bihor County's integration in the Romanian state, hefty investments were made in the 1930s, which led to the establishment of a second museum, Bihor County's National Center, in addition to the existing institution housed in the Children's Palace, Agerpres.ro informs.
"After 1948, in the new setting of the Romanian society, the museum was reorganized and renamed to the 'Petofi-Balcescu Museum' in a bid to emphasize the Romanian-Hungarian rapprochement, a good idea after all, because it builds on the unifying elements, not on what divides the two peoples," said the MTC director.
