Magyar Posta is issuing a commemorative stamp to mark the 250th anniversary of the birth of Countess Therese Brunszvik (1775-1861). The stamp pays tribute to one of Hungary’s most outstanding educational reformers and women in public life, whose endeavours fundamentally fashioned the principles and institutional system of child education in Hungary. Forty thousand copies of the stamp designed by the graphic artist György Kara were produced by ANY Security Printing Company.
Countess Therese Brunszvik was a pioneering figure in the history of Hungarian education, who, influenced by Pestalozzi’s pedagogy, opened the first kindergarten in the whole of the Habsburg Empire in Buda in May 1828. Due to her tireless work for the education and betterment of women and for disadvantaged children, a nationwide network of kindergartens was quickly established. In 1836, she founded the Association for the Promotion of Kindergartens in Hungary, which helped to spread nursery schooling in an organised way and led to the establishment of more than a hundred kindergartens by the time of her death. During her lifetime, she received no official state awards or honours, yet her work was recognised retrospectively in a variety of ways: by institutions, prizes, statues, memorial plaques and scientific works. Several kindergartens and schools across the country, and even a street, bear her name. In Budapest’s District I, a plaque commemorates the first kindergarten. Furthermore, the Therese Brunszvik Prize in memory of the founder of the Hungarian kindergartens is awarded every year for outstanding professional work in the field of child-centred pedagogy at kindergartens and in recognition of the excellence of educators in the training of pre-school teachers.
Opened in 1995, the Kindergarten Museum in Martonvásár is unique in Europe. The exhibition relates the story of institutionalised childcare associated with Therese Brunszvik.
The commemorative stamp shows a detail of a lithograph depicting Therese Brunszvik by Miklós Barabás and a stylised drawing of Brunszvik House in Buda, which was founded by the Countess in 1828 as the first kindergarten in Hungary and Central Europe. On the front of the first day cover is the first Hungarian kindergarten illustration from Amália Bezerédy’s work Flóri’ könyve sok szép képekkel, földrajzokkal és muzsika melléklettel, whose title translates “Flóri’s book with many beautiful pictures, geography and a music appendix”. The imprint of the special postmark on the first day cover depicts the hand of an adult holding the hand of a child.