Tales from the store: where in the world... (part 1)

Behind-the-scenes at Hull and East Riding Museum, our attention has turned to our World Cultures collections.  Most of these objects were acquired by the museum before the Second World War, and many were on display when Hull Municipal Museum was hit by enemy fire in during the Second World War (1939-1945).

The Second World War had a big impact on the museums in Hull, objects were damaged, destroyed or looted from the wreckage of the Municipal Museum.  Furthermore, a lot of the museum paperwork was also lost including records of objects - where they were from, the period they were from and how they got to Hull.

In the present day, we are trying to reunite objects with their stories and see if we can uncover their provenance (answering some of the questions above).  Sometimes we don't have much information to go on, which is where this particular story begins...

Ah Ha! I spot a clue!
cup: Hull and East Riding Museum

I had three boxes of objects on my list as the next set to document (put onto our museum database).  The outside of the box was marked Jászóvár, Hungary - however an initial Google search and glance at a map yielded nothing.  Jászóvár did not exist or, at least, it was no longer a place name.

Intrigued, I had to solve the mystery.  There was only one thing for it.  Time to take the plunge, look in the box and see if there was anything with or on the objects that might provide more of a clue.

Lovely handwriting in black ink from
cup: Hull and East Riding Museum

I was rewarded instantly - the first object had a label tied to it, handwritten in slightly archaic black ink it said "Jászóvár Takács M. barl.  1916.  (II gödör)".  I was ecstatic I had a bit more to go on, however I knew Jászóvár had yielded nothing.  I needed to take a different approach.

As an archaeologist, I knew this label probably recorded the site name, the year of excavation and maybe details of where on the site the object was found.  Typing 'gödör' into Google Translate, it auto-detected Hungarian (yes!) and translated it as 'pit'.  So the object was from pit number II, brilliant. BUT WHERE IN THE WORLD WAS IT FROM?!

Check out the next post in the series, to find out...