Orbán inaugurates national museum facility

“The identity of a nation and its civilisation is mostly reflected in culture,” Prime Minister Viktor Orban said on Tuesday at the opening ceremony of the National Museum Restoration and Storage Centre.

“We are proud of Europe’s Greek, Roman, Jewish, and Christian heritage” and of the contributions Hungarians have made over the past one thousand years to that culture, Orban said. “When we see that culture endangered there is an instant red light flashing in our mind and we will take immediate action.”

“Hungarians cannot be made an ethnic or cultural minority in their own cities,” Orbán said, adding that “whenever they think that their cultural identity is challenged, alarm bells ring.”

Concerning the new centre, Orbán said that

Europe had only two similar facilities, one operated by the British Museum in London and the other by the Ermitage in St. Petersburg.

The project has been “the greatest museum-related development in Hungary in recent decades”, he said. The centre will conserve over one million items and the building “makes Budapest even more beautiful, more modern, and greener”.

Referring to the collections, he said those one million items “are our living cultural heritage” rather than “dusty objects of a dead white culture as described by the left wing”. “Without the foundations of the past, we would be drifting rootlessly away in the storms of history,” Orbán added. Museums and their auxiliaries are “compasses of the mind”, he said.