EXHIBITION: “The Queen to Kill, You Must Not Fear, Will Be Good…“
The Ferenczy Museum in Szentendre in Hungary was until 2010 housed in a former Teachers’ Training College, which before the war belonged to the Serb Orthodox Church. After 1990 churches were allowed to recuperate their former property and the museum had to move. Celebrating the new location,an interesting temporary exhibition recently opened there.
The focus of the exhibition is the Royal Cistercian Abbey of Pilis, as well as Queen Gertrude, wife of King Andrew II, who was buried there after she was murdered 800 years ago. Stone carvings and archaeological finds excavated at the site of the ruined monastery are preserved in the museum’s collection.
Archaeological excavations were conducted at the site of the abbey already in the 19th century, but it was László Gerevich who was responsible for detecting the broken sepulchral monument of Queen Gertrudis, decorated with finely carved statues. The sepulchre as well as the abbey itself were some of the first monuments representing French Gothic in Hungary. The excavations gave evidence to the existence of a metallurgic workshop, a fishing lake and a water system outside of the formerly walled territory of the monastic complex. The ruins can be visited, but they are not exhibited in any way (and anyway no more than rubble). A recently started project is to explain the results of the excavations and to protect the revealed ruins on the site.
The story behind the murder of Gertrude in 1213, while she was on a hunting trip in the forests of Pilis, was quickly circulated in chronicles and other texts in a European context. To some extent the story seems to have been quite ordinary: as a Bavarian princess she had used her vast influence and political talents to favour members of her German family and retinue. This so angered Hungarian nobility that a rebellion broke out. However, later historians, artists and composers construed a national Hungarian myth out of her murder, veiling the actual circumstances. Both stories are told in the exhibition.
The exhibition, titled “The Queen to Kill, You Must Not Fear, Will Be Good…“ Commemorate Gertrude of Merania, 1213-2013 and is on view at the Barcsay Room of the Ferenczy Museum until December 31, 2013.
For more information please visit Jekely’s blogspot where a text has been provided by the curator, Judit Majorossy.
WHERE:
Ferenczy Museum in Szentendre
Kossuth Lajos utca 5,
Szentendre, 2000
Hungary
READ MORE:
Princely Brothers and Sisters: The Sibling Bond in German Politics, 1100-1250
By Jonathan R. Lyon
Cornell University Press; 1 edition (January 15, 2013)
This book is also available as an ebook from Amazon/Kindle, Google Ebooks, and Kobo.
