The aim of the permanent exhibition is to provide an answer to the question: Who are the Greek Catholics? What role do they play in Hungarian history and universal church history? The exhibition creators’ aim is to provide experiential knowledge that strengthens the identity of one’s own denomination, to arouse curiosity in museum visitors, and to provide an opportunity for immersion and wonder beyond basic knowledge.
The works of ecclesiastical art, liturgical objects and written documents in the exhibition are all related to the liturgical life of the Greek Catholic Church. Far from Eastern and Western, ecclesiastical and secular centres, the Greek Catholic Churches living in today’s Central and Eastern Europe, including the Hungarian Greek Catholics, created a peculiar, so-called “Carpathian” ecclesiastical art and culture in the 17th and 18th centuries. Over the past four centuries, a local version of the artistic tradition defined by the liturgical framework of the Byzantine rite has developed in the Carpathian Basin. This peculiar world of artworks and art style is still little known and understood. The exhibition helps the interpretation in an innovative way through objects, texts, audio and interactive contents.
The core material of the exhibition comes from hitherto unknown or little-known objects of the predecessor Greek Catholic Collection of Ecclesiastical Art, parish churches and national museum collections. In this form, they are presented for the first time.
