A Historical and Archival Guide to Székesfehérvár (Székesfehérvár, 2003)
AN OUTLINE OF THE HISTORY WRITING OF SZÉKESFEHÉRVÁR
We have but a few traces of this once rich written culture; it is difficult to reconstruct public history and town history from contemporary sources of the town and the loca credibilia. The pre-Turkish Period archives of Royal Free Borough Székesfehérvár were completely destroyed, so were the records of church institutes in the town. The only exception was the loca credibilia archives of the convent of St. }ohn crusaders, which was called St. Stephen convent. 1 Only from the end of the Turkish Period have there been coherent series available. Székesfehérvár is undoubtedly rich of local history works, which began to develop with new researches and publications in the 1 9 th centurv. 2 The first comprehensive work that attempted to relate the whole history of the town was published in 1861. The young student of law Kálmán Csapó ofTagyos 3 (later a lawyer) was the author of The History of Székes-Fehérvár, It was edited and published by bookseller Antal Räder. The book discusses predominantly the early period of the town's history; it deals with the history of the churches of the Árpád-dynasty, of the basilica, of the coronations and of the coats-ofarms of the town and the Latins. He reconstructed the general outline of town history based on The latest description of the history, geography and state of Hungary by Imre Palugyay, published in 1854. The book was completed with a collection of documents and illustrations; the published sources were the charters of King Leopold I, Queen Marie Theresa, and King Ferdinand I. It is certainly not an example of town history, but we have to mention Imre Henszlmanns discourse called the Results of the excavations in Székes-Fehérvár, which was published in 1864 in Pest. It gave an account of the results of the Virgin Marv coronation church excavations, which were unfortunately left unfinished in 1862. 4 (The tombs of Béla III and his wife in Székes-Fehérvár by János Erdy is worht mentioning on this subject, which he had written about the excavations of 1 848.) 5 There wasn't a wide range of opportunity provided for historiography and local history researches in Székesfehérvár in the 19 th century, although there existed a forum for them. The possibility to publish
