Považie Museum presents its most attractive acquisitions

The most beautiful and rarest items in the collections of Považie Museum in Žilina are on exhibit until the end of January 2010 in the complex of Budatín Castle, Adriana Brziaková, the cultural manager of the museum told the TASR newswire. Brziaková said the exhibition makes available just a torso of the current collection of the museum because annually about 800 items are added to its vaults. Brziaková also explained that this exhibition provides basic information about the way new artefacts are acquired and processed and presents individual departments and their collections in a more detailed way.

Budatín Castle with festive decorationBudatín Castle with festive decoration (Source: TASR)

The most beautiful and rarest items in the collections of Považie Museum in Žilina are on exhibit until the end of January 2010 in the complex of Budatín Castle, Adriana Brziaková, the cultural manager of the museum told the TASR newswire. Brziaková said the exhibition makes available just a torso of the current collection of the museum because annually about 800 items are added to its vaults. Brziaková also explained that this exhibition provides basic information about the way new artefacts are acquired and processed and presents individual departments and their collections in a more detailed way.

The archaeological department’s most interesting exhibits include a freshly restored vessel-burial urn from the village of Sedmerovec discovered by Anton Petrovský-Šichman, an archaeologist with the museum, in 1963. The urn is the biggest vessel of its kind in the museum, said Lucia Krišková, a current museum archaeologist, dates back 3,000 years to the late Bronze Age and its shards were from a burial ground of the Lužica culture.

“Hardly any present-time potter would be able to make something like this urn. The vessel, created at a top aesthetic and craft level, has finally undergone a complete restoration after more than 45 years and has been rightly included among the most beautiful exhibits of our archaeology collection,” Krišková stated.

The process for making the urn – firing at the heat of about 650 degrees Celsius – predestined the vessel to be very brittle. “Its restoration was demanding. There were about half a million individual combinations of shards. The missing parts were completed by plaster and painted with a similar paint,” said Michael Daskalakis, the museum’s pottery restorer. According to Krišková, similar vessels were used in Lužica culture for preserving the ashes and remains of human corpses ceremonially burned on a burial pyre. Sometimes, holes were bored in the undersides of the vessels to allow the deceased souls to depart to the ground. Other vessels, usually larger, containing food, herbs, or tea were also put in the ground.

The art of tinkery is represented with an installation of folk acquisitions like a women’s folk costume from Veľké Rovné, swaddling bands for babies and a wooden shovel used to bake bread. The collection is completed by paintings showing the motif of tinkery and tinkers, Brziaková added. The Žilina museum also specialises in the history of transport and acquisition of motor vehicles is underway this year, including a 50-year old motorbike from the Turiec region. The transport historian of the museum, Peter Šimko, said that it is still operable and can be ridden.

Even though Budatín Castle is currently closed for planned reconstruction, the exhibitions that have been installed in temporary premises have attracted more than 6,500 people since October 2009, according to Brziaková. The Most Attractive Acquisitions of the Museum exhibit continues to January 31.

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