Oldal 418 [418]
OCR
Lusos BELKA his own work and he also studied, described, catalogued, and compared the artefacts in the collections — particularly the Buddhist artefacts — brought back more than half a century earlier by Hans Leder. He worked in the museums in Hamburg, Bonn, and Heidelberg. He returned to Czechoslovakia, then in the midst of the so-called Prague Spring (a period of liberalization), which was ended by the ‘fraternal assistance in the form of the invasion of the allied Warsaw Pact countries,’ as the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia was officially designated, in the language of the time, until the Velvet Revolution of 1989. Jisl’s fourth and last trip to Mongolia was the shortest of all and could hardly be designated an ‘expedition’ in the strictest sense of the term, as he only stayed in Ulaanbaatar and did not travel outside of the capital city. Jisl insisted on going to Mongolia: Karel BeneS from the Ministry of Culture helped him arrange the trip and Lumir Jisl set off, seriously ill. None of the texts dealing with Jisl’s trips to Asia discusses this particular journey. The main goal of his visit to Ulaanbaatar was to acquire museum items for an upcoming planned exhibit in Prague’s Naprstek Museum of Asian, African and American cultures. The acquisition had been agreed upon in advance, but it was clear that the choice of individual items had to be made by an expert on the ground. And it was just as clear that the most qualified to this task in Czechoslovakia was Lumir Jisl. The negotiations were in progress, or should have been in progress in various museums in Ulaanbaatar, known intimately to Jisl from previous trips, as since 1957 he had been regularly studying and documenting Buddhist artefacts in their holdings. When he visited the partner institutions, however, he met with an unexpectedly chilly and dismissive response. He wrote about this in his personal diary from the trip to Mongolia in 1969: “29. [May 1969] Thursday Ministry of Culture, meeting. In sum: No one there knows anything, our stay is not until 6 [June], but to 2 [June], that is to say, we have to leave on Monday. No reaction to our objection that our air tickets are ordered for 6 [June], our stay cannot be extended. Interesting: the paleontologists left for vacation, the ethnographic section is closed for inventory, and no outside director can get in. Tension, cold discussions. Homola from the ministry enumerates his positions for them, and convinces them that relevant counter-measures will be taken in Prague. Then a tour of the National Museum, showing us everything but the ethnographic section in the last room, where [there was] a string tied across the steps, with a paper clearly just torn out of a notebook, and on the paper was written that it was closed. Till August, they said. I told them that it’s up to them whether they be represented in the Naprstek Museum by such a poor showing next to, let’s say, the updated Chinese installation, in addition to the fact that no one knows anything about Mongolian art and this could be publicity for 26 Mrs. Miroslava Pickova, personal communication, October 15, 2013. 416
