The museum is expected to reopen later this year, state news agency MTI reported.

Tarr announced the decision on Facebook, saying the institution would reopen once its final professional, financial and operational arrangements were in place.

Schmidt had headed the museum since it opened in 2002. The institution commemorates victims of the fascist Arrow Cross and communist-era secret police regimes.

The museum operated under the Central and Eastern European History and Society Research Foundation (KKETTK), which subsequently became one of the public interest asset management foundations recently abolished by the government.

Those foundations were established by the fourth Orbán government with the stated aim of ensuring that public interest tasks could be performed independently of successive governments. Prime Minister Péter Magyar previously said abolishing the foundations would not mean ending their activities, which would instead be carried out as state services.

In an earlier statement, Schmidt said the operations of the museum and other KKETTK institutions had always been transparent, efficient and lawful. Those institutions include the 20th and 21st Century Institutes, the Kertész Institute, the Habsburg Historical Institute and the Eötvös Institute.

Schmidt Says Dismissal Came Without Explanation

Responding to the announcement, Schmidt said she had learned of her dismissal only through Tarr’s Facebook post.

“I was not given any justification or explanation,” she wrote on Facebook. “There was no contact or communication between me and the ministry. My letters went unanswered.”

Schmidt questioned whether her dismissal was connected to her opposition political sympathies, arguing that selecting public collection leaders on political grounds would be incompatible with the European political culture invoked by the governing Tisza Party.

She added that neither the government nor the minister had previously indicated any concerns about the museum’s exhibition content or perspective.

Schmidt also compared the government’s approach with that of the now-defunct Alliance of Free Democrats, which she described as Tisza’s intellectual and political predecessor. She said that party had at least publicly expressed its objections to the museum’s Wall of Perpetrators and its equal condemnation of communist and Arrow Cross terror.

Opposition Demands Immediate Reopening

Fidesz’s parliamentary group demanded that the museum reopen immediately and that Schmidt be reinstated.

In a statement, the opposition party accused the government of seeking to undermine a major memorial to the 1956 revolution in the year of its 70th anniversary. It called the decision disgraceful and said previous left-leaning prime ministers had not taken such a step.

Bence Rétvári, parliamentary group leader of the opposition Christian Democrats (KDNP), also criticized the closure, accusing Tisza of attempting to erase and rewrite the past.

Rétvári described the museum as a symbol of anti-communism and resistance to dictatorship, as well as one of Hungary’s most visited museums. He questioned the assurance that the closure would be temporary, drawing a comparison with the decades-long Soviet military presence in Hungary, which had also been described as temporary.