East Slovak Museum — Collecting a Region into One Institution
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Transcript
The East Slovak Museum developed from a nineteenth-century civic collecting movement and now holds archaeology, art, natural history and historical collections from the wider region. Such museums were part of a European effort to define places through objects: coins, documents, crafts, fossils and art could be arranged into a regional narrative.
That process is never neutral. What gets collected determines what future visitors think was representative.
In Košice, a regional museum is especially interesting because political borders changed repeatedly. The collections outlasted several states, while interpretations of what “eastern Slovakia” meant evolved around them.