Debrecen4U August 13, 2026

Exhibition at Déri Museum Takes Visitors to Village in the Land of Wolves

An exhibition drawn from the remains of the former village of Szepes near Debrecen opened at the Déri Museum on Tuesday under the title Past of Szepes: A Village in the Land of Wolves. The exhibition showcases more than 2,000 artifacts uncovered by experts during excavations in the southern industrial zone between 2022 and 2024.

At the opening, Deputy Mayor István Puskás highlighted that our relationship with the past has a strong influence on how we perceive Hungarian culture and our identity. Thanks to the Déri Museum, we can look back thousands of years into Debrecen’s past, and this occasion also gives us an opportunity to peer into the depths of the region’s distant history, he added.

János Angi, Director of the Déri Museum, said that archaeological excavations carried out in recent years had rewritten what experts previously thought about the history of Debrecen and its surrounding areas, from the Neolithic period through to the Middle Ages. A major contribution to this has come from the series of excavations whose finds form the basis of the current exhibition.

The exhibition was opened by archaeologist István Ringer, Director of the Kazinczy Museum in Sátoraljaújhely. In his speech, he stressed that Hungarian archaeology is still in a period of gathering material as part of development projects. The large quantities of finds being unearthed present the profession with challenges on two levels: one is the sheer volume of data, and the other is how to handle the material evidence.

Archaeology can today strengthen people’s attachment to the places where they live, which is why it would be important to engage the wider public as much as possible and to make the archaeological research and findings from across the country known to as broad an audience as possible, he stressed. He pointed out that fewer and fewer exhibitions featuring archaeological material are being opened, making the current occasion a particularly special one. On display until the end of January, the exhibition includes animal remains, among them those of a wolf, as well as vessels and small metal objects.

Szepes was first mentioned in writing in the 1235 Váradi Regestrum. By the middle of the 14th century, it was already a village of 330 inhabitants, but it was destroyed by Crimean Tatars in 1594. The archaeological evidence nevertheless shows that the settlement existed decades earlier than the written sources indicate, as early as the second half of the 12th century. It is believed to have reached its heyday in the 15th century.

Source and photo credit: debrecen.hu