About us

In 1857, the founder-nameser of our institution, Rómer Flóris, a Benedictine monk of Győr, announced in the local daily the idea of founding the museum in 1857 - recognizing that in addition to the development of the high school's natural history, "anti-regs" can also be used well in school education. He was convinced that "the nation will need an even greater need to appreciate its historical values now, so he announced a collection. His efforts were crowned with success, on May 6, 1859, the provision of the imperial-royal central committee, which took care of researching and maintaining architectural monuments, officially founded the museum.

His worthy successors significantly developed the collection and named the museum after Rómer. In the 1920s, the Benedictine Museum was planned to be organized into a city museum, but the order and the city could not even agree by the mid-1930s, so the city museum was created on the first floor of the cultural center in 1939. After World War II, negotiations began again with the main abbey, which was ended by the state ownership of the Benedictine collection. In 1949, the material of the two museums was transferred to the former abbot's palace on the main square of the city, the Apátúr house. The combined collection was named after János Xántus, who lived in Győr in his childhood.

The museum's collections and exhibition spaces have increased significantly over time through gifts and purchases. Without claiming to be exhaustive: the surviving courtyard and dungeon of the Sforza half-bastion have housed the Roman and early modern stone collection since 1957. In 1974, the institution was expanded with the Margit Kovács collection, and in 1979 with the retrospective exhibition of Miklós Borsos, and then in 1986, a permanent exhibition presenting the representative material of the Imre Patkó Collection was opened in the Iron Stump House. The legacy of the Petz family in 1991, the Abád-Hauser Collection in 1998, and the special features of the Madách Collection in 2011 became part of the permanent exhibition at the Abbot's House. The Xántus János Museum was the headquarters of the Győr-Moson-Sopron County Museums Directorate from 1963 to 2012. In 2008, the county museum even expanded with a new exhibition space, the Fruhmann House opened the permanent exhibition Warmth of Home, showing the the history of the tile stove. The scientific yearbook, Arrabona, has continuously published new research results of the county's past since 1959.

In the meantime, in 1994, the city of Győr founded its own thematic museum, the City Art Museum, part of which was previously included in the collections previously belonging to the Xántus János Museum (Miklós Borsos Permanent Exhibition, Margit Kovács Permanent Exhibition), and another part — with the city's significant sacrifice — is the newly received or purchased collections and buildings, exhibition spaces, such as the Péter Váczy collection in the Magyar Ispita from 1995, the Radnai collection in the Esterházy Palace from 2005. The Vasilescu collection was housed in the synagogue from 2006 to 2023.

On the first of February 2013, the Rómer Flóris Art and History Museum was created from the two museums as a county-wide city museum with the old-new name, 11 exhibition spaces. Among the tasks of our institution, the visitor, the "education" to become a visitor, the transmission of values, the preservation and presentation of local culture played an important role.