Each year around Midsummer's Eve, as part of a Europe-wide initiative, museums in Hungary keep their doors open late into the evening and offer special programmes for visitors. As Hungary is celebrating Renaissance Year 2008, the 550th anniversary of the coronation of Matthias Corvinus, Hungary's "Renaissance king", the theme for many of this year's programmes was the Renaissance, and nowhere was this more evident than in the Castle District.
The Military History Institute and Museum hosted performances of period music in its courtyard, and in the square in front of the museum, a Renaissance fair was set up. Visitors could watch a blacksmith and a maker of chain mail at work or just mingle with the 15th century locals. Knights in armour showed their skills in battle with the broadsword, mace, spear and axe in contests on the edge of square. There was also a demonstration of period cannons.
Photo: Máté Nándorfi
Just a short walk away, the Budapest History Museum invited visitors to see its special exhibition "Splendour and Power" Matthias Corvinus, the King - Tradition and Renewal in the Hungarian Royal Court, 1458-1490, featuring more than 400 objects from Hungary as well as the Uffizi in Florence, the Vatican Library, Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum and collections in the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Germany.
Museum-goers could pick up where the Budapest History Museum's exhibition left off -1490 - at the Hungarian National Gallery, which showed an exhibition on the Jagiellon Dynasty.
Visitors to the National Széchényi Library, also in the Castle District, were treated to a fine display of illuminated manuscripts in the exhibition Star in the Shadow of the Raven - János Vitéz and the Beginnings of Humanism in Hungary, which shows the spread of the culture of the written word.
