Roman Lapidary

One of the most significant Roman stone collection and the medieval lapidary of Hungary and the wider region is exhibited in a unique and elegant exhibition hall under the inner yard of the museum and in a recently reconstructed space on the ground floor. The inscribed Roman archaeological relics are eminent historical sources, they complete our knowledge in the fields that are not covered by the reports of the historiographers of the Antiquity.

The Lapidarium, the Roman stone collection of the Hungarian National Museum, found home in the exhibition space constructed under the southern yard of the main building of the museum and in a room of the adjoining cellar system and in the recently covered southern yard.

The limestone ashlar walls of the cellar reflect the conditions that were created by the construction started by Mihály Pollack after his own designs in 1838. A yard raised by a several metres thick filling occupied the space of the hall of the Lapidarium until the construction work launched in autumn of 1996. The Hungarian National Museum, founded by Count Ferenc Széchényi in 1802, has been collecting archaeological remains, among them Roman inscribed and carved stones, related to the Hungarian land since its foundation. Still, this is the first time that the visitors of the museum can see more than two hundred of the nicest and most important items of the collection in a systematic exhibition