Prague, March 31 (CTK) – An exhibition in Prague’s National Technical Museum will present unique ancient documents and Czech collection items that were recently put on the UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register, such as the Kynzvart daguerreotype, the Janacek archive and the Camocio maps collection.
The week-long exhibition will open on April 5 and run through April 11.
The above items are three of the eight Czech entries in the UNESCO register.
Daguerreotype is a predecessor of photography. The Kynzvart one shows a still life with the motif of an artist’s studio.
The inventor of daguerreotype, Louis Daguerre, gave it as a present to Prince Klemens Metternich, Austrian chancellor and owner of the Kynzvart chateau, west Bohemia, in 1839, still before making his invention public.
It is the first daguerreotype of its kind, with a personal dedication from Daguerre.
The archive of famous Czech composer Leos Janacek (1854-1928) is kept by the Moravian Land Museum. With a few exceptions, it contains all manuscripts of Janacek’s compositions, their authorised copies, the author’s press emendations and first issues with Janacek’s comments.
There are also Janacek’s manuscripts of librettos, literary and expert studies, his notebooks, library and correspondence with more than 14,000 items.
The Czech-Maltese Camocio maps collection highlights the Great Siege of Malta in 1565.
According to experts, it is the only issue preserved in Euro-American collections. It helped experts reconstruct the whole cycle of combat reports from the crucial battle of Malta after 450 years.
The collection of the maps, whose author was Giovanni Francesco Camocio (1501-1575), is kept by the Charles University’s Faculty of Sciences.
Other Czech items on the Memory of the World Register are several collections kept by the National Library, a collection of Czech and Slovak Samizdat magazines from 1948-1989 and the Emile Reynaud light pantomimes from the collections of the National Technical Museum, the French National Centre for Cinema and the Moving Image and Josette Oudart-Reynaud.
The UNESCO register was established in the 1990s with the aim to preserve documents that should be part of human heritage. Apart from library documents, it contains audio, film and archive items. The Czech National Library assisted in its establishment.
