What does it mean in a person's life to be born at a crossroads? To Răscruci, a small village near Cluj-Napoca in Transylvania, where you breathe in the love of your mother tongue, your music, your dance, your endurance for your people. A crossroads („răscruci”) in the figurative sense, when it is a question of standing up for the preservation of Hungarian folk culture.
"We will be Hungarians as long as we sing and dance in Hungarian, because this culture has kept us alive."
Zoltán Kallós
Who is Zoltán Kallós? Collector, researcher, organiser, museum founder, teacher in the most noble sense of the word? The creator and catalyst of the link between those who live in traditional culture and those who want to discover, preserve, communicate and relive it? A path and a bridge to the source, a meeting point and a starting point for the continuation and the organic perpetuation of tradition?
What did and what does Zoltán Kallós' person, influence and oeuvre mean to Hungarians at home and abroad?
What role do Zoltán Kallós and his colleagues play today in preserving the cultural values and identity of Transylvania, the Moldavian Hungarians, and especially the Hungarian minority in the Mezőség, and in strengthening the region's ability to preserve and strengthen its Hungarian identity?
With our exhibition we focus on the different layers, periods, places and characteristics of Zoltán Kallós' oeuvre. Our aim is to draw attention to the influence of Zoltán Kallós on the cultural life of Hungarians in Hungary and abroad, and to show the role Zoltán Kallós played in inspiring and fulfilling the work of researchers from Hungary to Transylvania, especially György Martin and those who explored Transylvanian folk music and folk dance. We also want to publicise his role in the birth and widespread spread of the dance house movement.
The aim of the exhibition is to present Zoltán Kallós, the MAN and the microcosm that surrounded him, Kallós, who, like a good shepherd, created and continues to create unique values. In addition, the exhibition aims to show the role and importance of Zoltán Kallós's former and present "companions", the impact of the Zoltán Kallós Foundation.
In Zoltán Kallós we can honour, alongside Bartók and Kodály, one of the greatest Hungarian folklore collectors of the 20th century, whose life and outlook were fundamentally shaped by his friendship with György Martin," wrote Ferenc Pozsony in a book published on the occasion of his 80th birthday. Zoltán Kallós played a decisive role in the birth and development of the Hungarian dance-hall movement in Hungary and Romania, in its present achievements and renewal. Through his personal contacts, he selflessly helped whole generations interested in folk music, folk dance and folk poetry to learn about and experience the folk life of the Mezőség, Gyimes, Kalotaszeg and Moldavia.
The exhibition takes the visitor on a journey through time from the 1930s to the present day, through the reminiscences of the young and then middle-aged Zoltán Kallós, and through the memories of his life, he gains insight into his life and mission today.
During this journey through time, we want to present the life of Zoltán Kallós and his "companions" in the 1950s and 60s and 70s in several time sections in Mezőség, Gyimes, Kalotaszeg and Moldavia: how they lived - respecting each other's culture - during this period when Zoltán Kallós and his "companions" were visiting these regions of Transylvania and Hungary.
The methods, tools and techniques of collecting ethnography, folk music and folk dance in Transylvania and Hungary in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, and in the 1980s and today, will be presented. Using our own tools, we would also like to show that all this happened at a time when the research of the rapidly changing traditional culture was going on in Hungary, mostly in secret, tolerated or forbidden by the authorities, but least supported.
The exhibition focuses on the importance of Zoltán Kallós's own collection of 14,000 tunes, mainly on folk music, which are kept at the Institute of Musicology in Budapest and are now largely accessible on the Internet. The material presented here sheds light on how the ethnographic data collected by Zoltán Kallós, the ethnographic objects and documents that he contributed to public collections, shaped the knowledge of Hungarian ethnography and ethnographic museology on Transylvania and Moldavia.
The exhibition was organised by the Open-Air Ethnographic Museum in cooperation with the Zoltán Kallós Ethnographic Collection and the National Strategic Research Institute in Răscruci. The exhibition was supported by loans from the Budapest Museum of Ethnography, the Janus Pannonius Museum in Pécs, the House of Traditions in Budapest, the Institute of Musicology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest, the Zoltán Kallós Foundation in Sephardi, the János Kriza Ethnographic Society, the Transylvanian Ethnographic Museum in Cluj and private individuals.
Dr. Ibolya Bereczki
Open Air Museum of Ethnography
Szentendre
