Dr. Péter Balázs: Guide to the archives of Hungary (Budapest, 1976)
(Archives of the Evangelical /Lutheran/ Church) - Evangélikus Országos Levéltár (Evangelical National Archives)
ARCHIVES OF THE EVANGELICAL (LUTHERAN) CHURCH EVANGÉLIKUS ORSZÁGOS LEVÉLTÁR (EVANGELICAL NATIONAL ARCHIVES) 1085 BUDAPEST, Üllői út 24. Tel. 130-886. Director: Béla VETŐ The highest body of the Evangelical Church of Hungary, the Universal (to-day: National) Assembly decided in 1812 to establish its self-standing archives in the middle of the country, in Pest (now: Budapest). (Till then the archives of the Evangelical High School of Pozsony have preserved the archival material of the highest body of the church.) The founding and maintaining ecclesiastical body set a double task to the archives: to collect the written (original and copied) documents of the past of the Evangelical Church and to preserve the journals of the highest assembly, their acts and the papers of its highest officials. Consequently a part of the papers gathered in the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth is a collection, the other part derives from a registry. This distinction was blurred, however, owing to the then fashionable arrangement according to years. The material registered in this way is now distinguished from the registries of the twentieth century and the private collections as Archívum generális ecclesiae. The organization and first development of the archives was the work of the university professor Lajos SCHÉDIUS, the first archivist (1768-1347), executed with zeal and professional learning. The territorial reorganization of the Evangelical Church of Hungary in 1952 set an enormous new task to the archives. It had to collect the archival material of the earlier church districts, deaneries and the reorganized institutions. Thus the archives of the highest organ became a central archives. At this phase the Minister for Culture declared the Evangelical National Archives a special archives in 1970. This development is due to the high
