Who is a cívis? What is a cívis town like? What do the people who live, work and create in Debrecen, for Debrecen, every day, think about Debrecenity and about being a cívis? The Déri Museum’s renewed local history exhibition entitled “The World of the Cívis” will asnwer all these questions and more to know more about the history and cultural heritage of Debrecen, the cívis city.
Déri Museum, the largest countryside museum in Hungary, has won funds through The National Cultural Foundation’s Hungarian Genius Program. The sum of one hundred million hungarian forints provided an opportunity to renovate the localy history exhibit. The exhibit, on which works have begun over one and a half years ago, opened for the public eye for the first time on the 24th of June 2023.
The primary goal with this show is to ensure that the people of today learn about snippets of the town’s history, the stories that make the past relatable. Because the town we live in defi nes almost all the important aspects of our lives. But not only our contemporary town, where we live our lives every day, but the other(s), too, them invisible one(s), the town(s) of past times. It is a peculiar feeling and perhaps a little chilling to think that the home in which we live, the shopping centre where we purchase our goods, the school our children attend or any other building today was built upon a site where once a cemetery, church, or the house of some renowned or, conversely, nameless person stood. It might just happen that each day we tread in the footsteps of Péter Méliusz Juhász, Lajos Domokos, István Hatvani, Sámuel Kiss, Mihály Fazekas, Dániel Rakovszky, Imre Simonffy, József Csanak and their unnamed companions. The residents of this invisible town are still with us.
It is also important to show the past, the traces of the past left to us, to people visiting our town from faraway places, so that they, rather than rush through the town, can also sense something of that ‘spirit’ communicated from the past, which has made Debrecen what it is today.
The exhibition opens to the public on the Night of the Museums.
