| Excerpt |
Many of the artifacts and objects that make up the core collections of the Ţării Crişurilor Museum come from the patrimony of the former Society of Archaeology and History of Bihor County and Oradea. Founded during the second half of the nineteenth century, it managed to collect thousands of objects that together illustrate the local history from a political, cultural, economic and social perspective. Due to the many administrative and management changes that occured over the years, a good number of them have lost their original entries, important data being changed within the new registers. However, by researching the old ledgers we can reconstruct, at least documentarily, the contents of the original collections and form a fairly clear picture of what the institution was like in its early years. The present article focuses its attention on a much narrower framework, centered around the various stamps and seals collected by the Society from 1872 to about 1895. The discovery of a list compiled by Középessy Gyula, one of the first “museum custodians”, reveals new data regarding the methodology of the time and the interest in recording the pieces as thoroughly as possible. The first step will be to analyze the primary source and then to identify the seals that are still being kept in the collections of the museum or in those of other institutions. |