The Petőfi Cultural Agency – Danube Bend Region has placed a time capsule

The Petőfi Literary Museum (PIM) and the Petőfi Cultural Agency (PKÜ) sent a book to the future with the title “The time is right”. In addition to Petőfi’s poems, the works of poets still alive were selected in the time capsule placed at the end of the Petőfi bicentenary.

This year we celebrated Sándor Petőfi’s 200th birthday. At the end of the Petőfi bicentenary, a time capsule was placed in the National Bank by Demeter Szilárd, director general of the Petőfi Literary Museum, which was accepted by Dr. Csaba Kandrács, vice president of the Hungarian National Bank.

“We sent a book into the future. The title: “Time is right” – A Petőfi’s tricentenary anthology of Magyar Kultúra magazine. In addition to Petőfi’s poems, we have selected the works of poets who are still alive today, poems that are connected to the aspirations and challenges of the reform era due to their themes, questions, and emotional-ideological content.

We edited this manuscript with the hope and confidence that a hundred years from now, the then director general of the Petőfi Literary Museum will publish this book of poems. Because we believe that whatever the next century holds, in 2123 the Hungarians will celebrate the 300th anniversary of Petőfi’s birth in the Carpathian Basin, and literature will still be important to them.

In addition to contemporary poems, the time capsule also contains Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s message to those who will be able to pick up this volume a hundred years from now.

It is a special pleasure and a great honor that we were able to place the time capsule in the Hungarian National Bank, because this is how we ensure that this message will not be forgotten. The stability of the Magyar Nemzeti Bank is the guarantee that this manuscript will not become a latent document in a collection” – said the Director General of PIM.

A short film about the placement of the time capsule can be viewed here: