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Budapest museums · History
History · since 1872

Museum of Ethnography

original name: Néprajzi Múzeum
significant
Hungarian peasant life is gathered here more densely than anywhere, yet the reason to come is the overseas material — collections a country without colonies had no business owning. Bíró’s New Guinea things reached Budapest because Austria-Hungary opened doors for its naturalists across the world. Set beside the Royal Museum for Central Africa at Tervuren the Congolese part is small; the Oceanian part stands with the strongest in Europe. The 2022 building is the second reason: galleries below ground, a roof that serves as parkland.
Minimum route
1.5–2.5 hours
Founded
1872
Ticket
from HUF 4,900
Today
10:00–18:00
What to see

The Oceania collection, about 14,500 objects, three quarters of them gathered by four men around 1900. Lajos Bíró brought six thousand things back from New Guinea between 1896 and 1901, along with three hundred photographs. 466 objects from the Congo came in 1910 from Emil Torday, who worked for the British Museum. The Ceramics Hall ranges the pottery of the world in rows, with no line drawn between home and abroad. Zoom, the second permanent display, is about how a gaze at another culture shifts.

Minimum route — 1.5–2.5 hours for the essentials

40 minutes in the collection display, taking the Oceanian and African sections. 25 minutes in the Ceramics Hall. 25 minutes for Zoom. 15 minutes on the roof for the view over the City Park, weather permitting.

Reference
About the museum
Founded in 1872 as a department of the National Museum, it spent a century in a palace facing the parliament. The new house in the City Park opened on 23 May 2022: Marcel Ferencz and the NAPUR office put the galleries underground and left a grass roof on top for people to walk on. Exhibition space tripled with the move, and the holdings run to some 250,000 objects.
Getting in
Address
Dózsa György út 35, 1146 Budapest
How to get there
Metro M1 to Hősök tere. The building stands at the edge of the City Park; the entrance faces the square.
Opening timeschecked on 22 August 2026, the museum website
open now until 18:00
Monclosed
Tue–Sun today10:00–18:00
Closed on Mondays, and so is the Ceramics Hall. The entrance hall on the Heroes’ Square side is open 10:00–18:00.
Ticketschecked on 22 August 2026, the museum website
Collection display together with Zoom, 4,900 forints. Zoom alone, 1,700.
from HUF 4,900
tickets online
When to go
A Tuesday or Wednesday morning, we would say. In summer the roof bakes, and evening is the sensible time to climb it.
Contacts
neprajz.hu
Access for visitors with limited mobilitychecked on 22 August 2026, the museum website
The museum — step-free. The building was designed to be step-free: the galleries are reached from both main entrances without stairs. Lifts run between the ground floor and level −2. A wheelchair is lent at either entrance for the length of the visit.
Nearby
All nearby
If this moved you
In the same city

If the overseas holdings make you ask how a country without colonies came by such things, the answer begins at the National Museum, of which this one was first a department.

outstandingNational Museum
Abroad

If you read the peasant things as material for art, a house built wholly out of that material stands in Moscow: Viktor Vasnetsov raised it for himself in 1894 and furnished it to his own drawings.

for enthusiastsThe Vasnetsov House · Moscow
· No. 106

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