Communities select and mark spaces of experience for practices of collective memory through various social practices. Focal points designated for remembering can be specific spaces, streets, but even buildings or objects, which can become sites of local memory through their names. See > monument, > memorial, > skansen, > museum. Marking something with inscriptions, plaques, naming specific points of physical space is the first and most important step in protecting a monument. In comparison, taking possession of the site, turning the monument into a skansen and filling it with content befitting a museum (site-specific artefacts) represents a qualitative change. When it was built, the Wenckheim Palace in Ókígyós was not yet a museum or a collection of museum objects, although it did have an art collection and on some sections of its walls the family kept its own museum “stories.”

After the change of its function in 1945, the palace functioned as a school for a long time. The first real attempts at renovation and the protection of the building as a historic monument only began in 1956. At the end of the 1960s it was briefly used as a film set and then gradually became a tourist attraction. The completion of these works was marked by a contemporary plaque at the entrance staircase. The park was not given protected status until the late 1980s. The change of function was not smooth: it involved the forced removal of the family, the looting of the palace, the nationalization of the building, the appropriation of furniture and objects, and the conscious collection of objects for museums. The people who lived there approached the palace sometimes with a certain amount of passion (thereby reinforcing forgetting), but sometimes with certain pride, cherishing a sense of ownership of the walls and preserving a few of the palace’s details. Instead of destruction and forgetting, however, the benevolent appropriation of the past has saved the palace and sometimes its accessories rather than letting them perish.

The recent transformation of the building into a museum has been gradual and initially slow. In 2011, the school ceased to operate, then an inventory of the heritage was completed, an architectural survey of the building was carried out, the archaeological and archival past of the walls and the park was explored; finally, the reconstruction plans were drawn up and the building was renovated. This process involved supplying the rooms and spaces with new content, and the creation of a thematic exhibition at the end.

Gathering, staging, or (re)creating the mosaic-pieces of the past (whatever it may have been) was part of this re-playing. These were necessary points of reference, supported with the commonplace that the “history” of the palace had to be re-played and replayed here. Therefore, the most important task was not the “repetition” of the stories themselves, but the act of repetition, of re-playing itself. This became the learning process through which the palace found new life. Understanding the past, the transmission, and the channelling of knowledge. In this study I seek answers to the question of how to refill the emptied spaces, what to do with the lost and then found objects in the palace, and how to “fill” the place with “memories”?