The exhibition of climbing in Turnov and the South Bohemian Museum has museum awards

Prague - The museum achievement of the year 2019 today became the exhibition commemorating the history and present of Czech mountaineering. The organizing Association of Museums and Galleries awarded one of the main prizes in the Gloria musaealis competition to the Museum of the Czech Paradise in Turnov. The awards were presented at the Municipal House in Prague, where the hall usually filled with museum workers, curators, and historians was replaced by an online broadcast due to the pandemic. Even so, the award ceremony had already been postponed from its May date.

It began with the song "Veličenstvo Kat" by Karel Kryl, with guitar accompaniment and a recitation of the song's lyrics by Jan Kačer. The moderators explained this was due to a ban on singing during the state of emergency. A microphone covered with a mask was prepared for the performers on stage.

A total of 60 museums and galleries submitted 87 projects to the competition. The competition aims to draw public attention to the best happening in Czech museology.

According to the jury, the Turnov Museum created an impressive exhibition space within the architecturally inventive extension of the museum, transforming a fundamentally simple structure into a mountainous landscape, working with significant symbolism. The exhibition "Mountaineering - From the Czech Paradise to the Peaks of the World" was opened by the museum last September. It was created as part of the project "For Climbers, There Are No Borders," supported by the European Union. Our partner in the project was the town of Bad Schandau in nearby Saxony, where a smaller exhibition "Climbing Worlds in the Elbe Sandstone" was developed.

Director Vladimíra Jakouběová stated today that after the opening of the new exhibition, the museum's visitor numbers increased by 20,000 people. The museum managed to acquire many exhibits for it as donations. "There is a strong climbing community here; in Turnov and the surrounding area, at least one climber can be found in every family, and since we announced our intention to create the exhibition in 2011, people have provided us with a large number of donations, and the collection continues to grow," she said.

Second place in the museum achievement category went to the City Museum and Gallery in Hořice for the project "Museum Reconstruction and New Exhibition: From Stone to Sculpture," and third place to the National Agricultural Museum for the modernization of the site in Valtice and new exhibitions. The jury also recognized the City Museum of Brno for the project "Baron Trenck: A New Face of the Legend." The exhibition was the result of research into the mummified body of the nobleman František Trenck.

In the category of Museum Exhibition of the Year, the South Bohemian Museum in České Budějovice won for its new exhibitions showcasing natural history, archaeological, and ethnographic collections. Second place went to the Museum of the Capital City of Prague for the exhibition "Poor Prague: People - Places - Institutions (1781-1948) / EPOS 257: Smoky Mountain," which focused on the theme of poverty and social exclusion.

The third award was given to the Technical Museum in Brno for the exhibition "In Difficult Times: Struggles for Borders (1918-1919)," which highlighted the dramatic events surrounding the establishment of Czechoslovakia. Two special awards were given to the Dr. Aleš Hrdlička Museum in Humpolec for its new exhibition and the National Gallery Prague for its new permanent exhibition dedicated to 19th-century art.