OUR STORY

A legacy cared for across generations

The Memorial Room has survived because the poet’s family continued to care for it after his death.

Lőrinc Szabó’s wife, Klára Mikes, and their daughter, Klára Gáborjáni-Szabó, preserved the study and its contents. Later, the poet’s son, G. Szabó Lőrinc, continued this work and in 1994 established the Lőrinc Szabó Foundation in part to provide an institutional framework for preserving the Memorial Room and his father’s legacy.

Following his death in 1997, the work was continued by his widow, Éva Szabó, and his daughter, Réka Gáborjáni-Szabó.

Literary historian Lóránt Kabdebó played an exceptional role in the scholarly preservation and study of Szabó’s oeuvre. Through the Lőrinc Szabó Research Centre at the University of Miskolc, he and his colleagues spent decades editing, researching and making important parts of the poet’s written legacy accessible.

Today, the Foundation continues this work with a new generation of the family beginning to take part in preserving and communicating the legacy.

WHAT WE PRESERVE

More than a collection

THE MEMORIAL ROOM TODAY

Why now? Preservation cannot wait

The Memorial Room is currently closed to the public.

A historic apartment and the objects it contains require continuous care. Books, papers, furniture and personal belongings are vulnerable to time, light, dust, changes in temperature and humidity, while the apartment itself requires maintenance and conservation.

Our first responsibility is therefore not to create a new museum display, but to preserve what has survived.

We want to document the room and its contents systematically, assess conservation needs, improve the conditions in which the collection is kept and make selected materials digitally accessible.

The longer-term aim is simple but ambitious: to open the door again.

WHAT WE ARE WORKING TOWARDS

A small literary place with a wider reach

The Volkmann Street apartment will never be a large museum – nor should it become one.

Its value lies precisely in its intimacy and authenticity.

We envisage a Memorial Room that can welcome visitors in small numbers; provide meaningful encounters for students, readers and researchers; make more of its collection available digitally; and host carefully conceived literary and educational programmes connected with Szabó’s work, literary translation and twentieth-century Hungarian culture.

The aim is not simply to preserve a room unchanged.

It is to keep the literature around it alive.

HELP PRESERVE THE MEMORIAL ROOM

Why support matters

A real place needs real care

The survival of the Memorial Room has depended for decades on the commitment of people who believed that this unusual literary place was worth preserving.

The next stage requires more.

Donations help the Foundation care for the apartment and its collection, document and digitise surviving materials, address conservation needs and prepare for the possibility of reopening the Memorial Room to visitors.

Every contribution, large or small, helps preserve a place where an important part of twentieth-century Hungarian literary history was actually lived and written.

Your support helps us to

SUPPORT THE MEMORIAL ROOM

Make a donation

The Lőrinc Szabó Foundation welcomes support from Hungary and abroad.

Transparency

The Lőrinc Szabó Foundation is a registered Hungarian foundation. Its annual reports and official documents are publicly available on the Hungarian section of this website.

Official documents →