Do not give up on culture while staying at home!

Due to the present situation, many of us spend almost every day at home and we don’t really have the opportunity to go out after work. Museums, galleries, cultural institutions and entertainment centers closed weeks ago, so it is understandable that most of us miss the cultural programs. Fortunately, plenty of institutions have responded to the present situation, so you don’t have to give up on culture at home either! This week we have collected the best opportunities for you so you can stay at home and enjoy the best exhibitions or literary evenings from the couch!

Surely there are many of you who had to cancel a trip abroad due to the epidemic, the visits to the local sights and museums are canceled too this time. However, most international museums can be explored in detail on a virtual tour, so while at home, you can explore the museum online and read about the works you like, making up for the experience you missed or preparing to be more informed during a trip in the future. You can explore the British Museum, the Vatican Museum, the Uffizi Gallery, the Louvre and the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and browse in the collection of MoMA. In addition, we would like to draw your attention to the Google Arts&Culture project, where you can browse the collections of many museums, find more virtual tours and get to know more artists by looking at high-resolution images!

Fortunately, we can also explore the collections of Hungarian museums online, we can visit the Hungarian National Gallery’s recently reorganized exhibition Variations on Realism — From Munkácsy to Mednyánszky, and the lovers of modern art can visit the Ludwig Museum’s exhibition The Dead Web — The End virtually. Those, who love literature, should take a look at the virtual exhibition of the Petőfi Literary Museum about Magda Szabó and János Arany! And if your children are at home due to the closed schools, we recommend the online museum pedagogy programs of Petőfi Literary Museum. For small children, we recommend the Gyerekdalok és Mondókák series and the MeseTv channel in general!

You don’t have to give up on literary evenings or even concerts, you can watch 80 concert recordings and 40 literary evenings for free in the digital media library of MÜPA. Watching a recording is a great program for the evenings! If you want a lighter program for the evening, you don’t have to limit yourself to Netflix when choosing a film, as the Hungarian National Film Archive has made 90 films available online if you want something classic, and you can “borrow” a film for 24 hours for two dollars at the website of Cirko Film, which is much less than the price of a movie ticket. These art films aren’t easily available once they’re off the screen, so we definitely recommend you take a look at them!

You may also miss the libraries during these times if you have already read every book you have at home. If you have an e-book reader, you are now in an easier position, as you can buy a new book at any online bookstore at any time (for a much cheaper price than a printed book), but if you don’t want to buy a new book or want to wait for delivery, we recommend the MEK website, to which more and more materials are added constantly, and the Digital Academy of Literature, where you can choose from a wealth of literary novels. If all that wasn’t enough, you can find books from many publishers online on a wide variety of topics on the website of Szaktárs and Arcanum. You can also listen to technical audiobooks for free for 30 days with AmazonAudible. Finally, in this group, there are many live broadcasts that many artists, even young artists share from their own homes!

We hope that with the above recommendations we can help you get through and spend your days usefully at home. We will post another article soon, in the meantime, write us about what you would like to read here on the BES blog and we will write a post about the best topics!