Budapest’s House of Terror Museum Temporarily Shuttered, Pending Review of Controversial Political Exhibitions

The House of Terror Museum in Budapest has been closed temporarily by Hungary’s culture minister, Zoltán Tarr, who has also fired the museum’s director, Mária Schmidt. In a Facebook post, Tarr said that the museum would reopen later this year “pending a review of the exhibition’s content.”

The museum closure is part of new Hungarian Prime Minister Péter Magyar’s attempts to rectify his predecessor, Viktor Orbán’s, control of state media and arts and culture entities. Magyar won a landslide election this spring, unseating the far-right nationalist Orbán after 16 years in power.

The House of Terror Museum opened in 2002, during Orban’s first term, and presented exhibitions related to Hungary’s fascist and communist history. According to the Budapest Times, the museum was operated by the KKETTK Foundation (the Foundation for Research on Central and Eastern European History and Society), which has also been dissolved by Parliament. The foundation’s website notes that, since 2002, more than 8 million people have visited the museum, which, together with its various affiliated institutes, also hosted conferences, published books, and organized exhibitions.

When the House of Terror Museum first opened, the New York Times reported that its many critics accused it of being a “political stunt,” pointing to its overly polished retelling of violent history and haunting music. Schmidt, the former director, had also been an adviser to Orban. At the time, she was unbothered by the museum’s overt political bent, telling the Times that “The political motivation of those who work here is to show that the system of terror was terrible—the Communist terror was terrible. Today in Hungary you cannot use the word ‘Communist.’ People act as though that part of history never happened.”

The museum’s website includes a banner on the homepage noting that the museum is temporarily closed “due to technical reasons.” Recent exhibitions include paintings by József Ringhoffer depicting his experience of the uprising at Tiszalök, a forced-labor camp, in 1953, and an exhibition of photographs from the museum’s collection documenting the 1965 Hungarian Revolution.