Tímár House (Pécs Historical Museum)

The Pécs City History Museum was established in 1985 from the material of the New and Recent Historical Department of the Janus Pannonius Museum. The permanent exhibition presenting the city's modern history – the Pécs industry, one of the characteristic leather processing activities from the Middle Ages, displayed at its former 18‑19th century site – can be seen at 9 Felsőmalom Street, in the so‑called Tímár House built in 1786, a one‑storey leather‑manufacturing building with a drying attic from the late Baroque period. This large‑scale exhibition presents, with the help of numerous documents, photographs, artworks, maps and models, characteristic moments of the city's rich history, from the liberation from the 143‑year Turkish rule (1686) to the Second World War and the subsequent coalition period (1948).

The most important parts of the museum

The protected machinery series of the Pécs Leather Factory founded in 1762, the Benő Zsoldos card, the radio, the pedagogical collection, the material memories of the Pécs Songbook, the miner's dwelling, shoemaker workshop interiors, the bell‑foundry samples, Daniel Irinyi's silverware (1867), the company flags and the pipe collection.

The permanent exhibition titled "From the expulsion of the Turks to the 'turning year'" uses material objects, documents and photographs to convey the city's multifaceted development.

Tanners and the history of the settlement

After obtaining municipal rights, after 1780 the tanning industry in Pécs also began a rapid development. In the Tettye stream valley and on Malom Street tanners settled, who utilized the stream water and dried the processed leathers on the houses' attics. Their distinctive wooden‑frame construction can still be observed in the museum building. Its former owner, József Pelikán, a tanner who settled here from Bohemia in 1773, had a large hall built in the courtyard of the house in 1788. He operated a banquet and dance hall there, which the townspeople called the "Mágocser dance house" after his wife of Magocsi origin.

The museum exhibition was set up on the upper floor, in the former ballroom, in the place of the restaurants and the owner's apartment in 1984, after the complete renovation of the house. In the first room, where the apartment’s kitchen once was, alongside exhibits referring to the Turkish occupation, the model of the Gázi Kászim Pasha mosque from Széchenyi Square is displayed (work of architect Attila Fetter).

In the subsequent rooms the civil development can be traced. After 1780 the formation of a new and modern bourgeois city began. The greatest urban planning change of the period was caused by the rapid increase in population. The city, which in 1780 was still in 19th place, fell to 24th place by 1850, but by 1870 it was already in eighth place among provincial towns, and by 1910 it became the 5th largest settlement in Hungary. This growth without precedent could hardly have been achieved without the city’s traditional functions. The increased employment opportunities were provided by coal mining, coke and gas production, energy‑intensive industries, ceramics, brickmaking, and lime production. A similar impact on demographic and urban transformation could have been caused by the relatively low‑cost coal‑using machine and metal‑working industry, brewing and tobacco industry, furniture and leather industry. From the more industrially developed regions of the Austro‑Hungarian Monarchy, nearly seven thousand workers were transferred to the factory colonies.

The industrialists and merchants were mostly Germans, and in the manufactories and vineyards the workers were largely Bosniaks living in the Barátúr area. From 1853, the Austrian-Hungarian interest-owned Danube Shipping Company began coal extraction in the mines it had purchased, and then successively took over the smaller mines of the area. It also built its own residential district, which was called Kolónia. In the 1850s and 1860s of the 19th century, industrial enterprises that created the conditions for modernization were established: the first Pécs Flour and Brick Factory, the Zsolnay factory, the Scholz and Hirschfeld breweries, the Weidinger steam mill, the Littke Champagne Factory, the Hamerli Glove Factory, the Havas and Ritter machine factories, the Engel Adolf parquet factory, the Angster organ factory. In 1882 the Pécs Chamber of Commerce and Industry was founded. The relocation of the Itélőtábla to Pécs represented the expansion of the city’s administrative authority, with a client base extending to the Adriatic. At the turn of the century, the city hospital, one of the largest health institutions in Hungary, treated 1,400 patients simultaneously. Pécs became the economic centre of the three southern Transdanubian counties. The history of the city’s industry and economy outlined here is presented in the Upper Mill Street museum with objects, historical documents and furnished interiors, illustrated and scientifically credible. Among these are notable: the guild letters, the communal chests, and the flag of the merged guilds from 1802, the reconstruction of the editorial office of the newspaper *Munkás* founded in 1898, the clothing of the turn‑of‑the‑century era, and finally a tobacco‑processing workshop, a haberdashery shop and a café detail from the interwar years.