Zemplén Museum

The Zemplén Museum in Szerencs grew from a local-history collecting drive that began among townspeople and amateur historians in the 1960s. A turning point came when the dentist Dr. László Petrikovics bequeathed his personal collection of some 400,000 picture postcards, along with his bookplates, scientific books and local-history material, prompting the opening of the Szerencs Museological Collection on 15 July 1967. The institution changed names several times as its scope grew — becoming the Szerencs Local History Museum in 1968, the Takta Museum in 1975, and finally the Zemplén Museum in 1977. Its postcard holdings have since expanded to roughly 900,000 items, reportedly the largest such archive in Hungary, alongside an ex-libris collection of about 36,000 bookplates. The museum received a special Museum of the Year award in 2012 in recognition of this unusually large documentary archive.