Museum of Universal Ethnography
The "Franz Binder" Museum of Universal Ethnography (Romanian: Muzeul de Etnografie Universală "Franz Binder") is the only museum in Romania that specialises in non-European ethnology. It was opened in 1993 in a house known as the Hermes House, on the Small Square in Sibiu's old city centre. It was based around an initial group of artifacts collected by the members of the Transylvanian Association for Natural Sciences (German: Siebenburgische Verein fur Naturwissenschaften) in the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. The collections were expanded after the museum's opening, and now number over 3000 items.
The museum is named after Franz Binder, a merchant and a diplomat who spent more than 20 years in Africa at the middle of the 19th century. A particularly remarkable piece in the museum is an ancient Egyptian mummy donated by the Austro-Hungarian consul in Egypt in 1907, Hermann von Hannenheim. The newer collections contain artifacts from Japan, Indonesia, Ecuador and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In addition, over 400 pieces have been donated from the gifts fund donated to the Romanian Presidency between 1965 and 1989.
Read more about this topic: ASTRA National Museum Complex
Famous quotes containing the words museum of, museum and/or universal:
“I never can pass by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York without thinking of it not as a gallery of living portraits but as a cemetery of tax-deductible wealth.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“[A] Dada exhibition. Another one! What’s the matter with everyone wanting to make a museum piece out of Dada? Dada was a bomb ... can you imagine anyone, around half a century after a bomb explodes, wanting to collect the pieces, sticking it together and displaying it?”
—Max Ernst (1891–1976)
“The earliest instinct of the child, and the ripest experience of age, unite in affirming simplicity to be the truest and profoundest part for man. Likewise this simplicity is so universal and all-containing as a rule for human life, that the subtlest bad man, and the purest good man, as well as the profoundest wise man, do all alike present it on that side which they socially turn to the inquisitive and unscrupulous world.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)