Ice Age exhibition at Móra Ferenc Museum reaches 100,000 visitors

NewsCulture

Feb 25

SZEGED, Hungary — The Ice Age exhibition at the Móra Ferenc Museum welcomed its 100,000th visitor on Wednesday morning, marking a milestone for the Szeged institution ahead of the show’s closing next month.

The 100,000th visitors were a retired couple from Budapest who traveled to Szeged specifically to see the Ice Age exhibition before it closes. Museum officials said the couple did not want to miss the show, which ends on March 8.

Mayor László Botka attended the event, where he also presented museum director Ottó Fogas with a renewed five-year appointment. Fogas, who has led the museum for three consecutive terms, was unanimously reappointed by the city assembly on Friday. His current mandate expires in May.

Speaking at the museum, Botka said the building’s full renovation, completed in 2020, created modern exhibition spaces capable of hosting large-scale, high-profile shows. Since then, the museum has organized a series of exhibitions that drew tens of thousands of visitors, including shows dedicated to Empress Elisabeth (“Sissi”) in 2021, the American Wild West in 2022, Ancient China in 2023, and painter Mihály Munkácsy in 2024.

According to the mayor, many visitors traveled to Szeged from other parts of Hungary, boosting tourism in the city alongside museum attendance.

Under the city’s recently approved 2026 budget, the Móra Ferenc Museum will operate with 1.9 billion forints this year. Botka said 219 million forints, or 19 percent of that total, is provided by the central government.

In brief remarks, Fogas noted that the museum’s exhibition space was inaugurated in 1896. A Munkácsy exhibition held there in 1898 drew 95,000 visitors, a record that stood for more than a century.

The attendance record was first surpassed in 2018, when a dinosaur exhibition attracted 98,000 ticket buyers. The most visited exhibition in the museum’s history remains the Egypt exhibition in 2014, with 114,000 visitors, followed by the Pompeii exhibition in 2016 with 102,000. Both of those shows were held across three venues: the Móra Ferenc Museum, the Kass Gallery and the Fekete Ház.

Museum officials said that among exhibitions held at a single venue, the Ice Age exhibition now ranks first with 100,000 visitors. The show opened on June 21 during Hungary’s Night of Museums program and is scheduled to close on March 8. Officials said attendance is expected to increase further in the final days.