Hungary’s most visited castle – hosting the Helikon Castle Museum – received the first batch of restored furniture on Thursday, Minister of State for Culture János Halász said at a press conference in the museum in Keszthely, southern Hungary. The museum has 200,000 visitors a year.
The baroque castle was built by the then owners of Keszthely, the Festetics noble family. The castle and most of its furnishings survived World War II intact. These include the 80,000-volume library, the largest intact collection of its kind in Europe.
Mr Halász said last year the state restituted 75 pieces of art – mostly furniture – from the former Festetics castle to their rightful owners, the Sigray family. To fill the resulting void, a decision was taken to bring back furniture from the Festetics heritage, currently being housed by other public collections.
The first five pieces, from the collection of the Budapest Arts and Crafts Museum, arrived on Thursday after careful restoration, towards which the ministry contributed 600,000 forints (EUR 2,000) last year and 2.3 million forints (EUR 7,600) this year. The restoration and relocation of the furniture will continue, primarily by bringing back Festetics furniture that is currently not on display in other museums.
Mr Halász also said that the museum – ran by a state-owned non-profit company – originally received 103 million forints (EUR 340,000) state support for this year, which was later supplemented with another 15 million (EUR 50,000).
(Ministry of Human Resources)
