HUNGARIAN TELEPHONE IS 140 YEARS OLD

Since the safekeeping of collected items is a major undertaking, the Post Museum constantly faced storage problems during the 65 years before the opening of the 1955 exhibition. During this period, postal items were stored on the first, second and third floors of the Central Post Office; in various rooms at the finance offices of the National Post and Telegraphy Office; in an 8 room caretaker's apartment of the Lágymányos Telegraph Centre that was assigned for museum use; in 2 rooms at the Pauler Street storage; in the vehicle garage of the Óbuda post office and the post station in Stefánia Street. Even after 1955, the storage problems of the Post Museum still existed as the opening of its first subsidiaries in Balatonszemes (1962) and Nagyvázsony (1968) did not resolve the situation. An own museum building would have provided a solution to the storage deficit. In an effort to accommodate the postal museum, the Post Directorate purchased the dilapidated Slovak Evangelical church building located at 57 Rákóczi Street in 1970. Due to high renovation costs, however, the postal museum was moved into a lodging, namely the exquisite halls of the Saxlehner-palace located at 3 Andrássy Street, from where the Hungarian Philatelic Society had just moved out. The impressive halls have housed the Postal Museum exhibitions for 40 years, but the building was not suitable for storing larger collections. Although the number of subsidiaries increased significantly in the following years with the involvement of settlements like Debrecen (1980), Ópusztaszer (1987), Hollókő (1990), Budapest (1991), Diósd (1995), Miskolc (1998), Pécs (1999), Kiskunhalas (2002) and Kőszeg (2004), storage problems are still unresolved.