The National Archives of Hungary (Budapest, 2006)

ECCLESIASTICAL ARCHIVES - The Archives of the Hungarian Calvinist Church by Erzsébet Horváth, István Szabadi, Márk Szentimrei, József Hadi, Edit Nagy

publication of the documents of Pál Ráday 1703-1711, published under the editorship of Kálmán Benda. Arrangement of the church district archives was started right after the following year of the flood in Pest in 1838, the archives was delivered to Kecskemét. There was an urgent need to be looked after it by paid employees in 1845. The start of the open research archives can be considered the beginning of the 20

th century, from the decree no 81 675 of 1904 VKM . It was announced a public collection together with Ráday Library and undertook professional obligation of the time. The institution was opened for the public at its present address in 1913, which was common with Budapest Theological Academy and which has been reconstructed and enlarged many times since then. The post of the caretaker was taken by the theological teacher, István Hamar who also graduated as a librarian and archivist. So he could start professional writing up of the archives. The church district from 190^ the national church from the 1930s made important decisions in the affairs of archives keeping the documents of the archives, establishing archives and their special conditions. The directions were partly realized but most of them couldn't be fulfilled mainly during and after the war so they were forgotten. During the college principality and support of László Papp (1951-1957) and with the help of the archivist Kálmán Benda the archives became a real scientific workshop. It was the time when the archives of the church district unified with the archival material of the Ráday Library for ever. The organizational form of present day came into being and started to operate as 'an independent institutions, later as special archives and then upon the act of 1955 open public archives. We have 20-22 research hours a week. In the last few decades we loaded several thousand lines of finding aids on the computer, with the help of application support. Beside the traditional finding aids these can already be used as work copies both on computer and paper. Organizing them into a bigger and more unified data base and making them accesible on the Internet is the task of near future. Front page of (the 'magazine' Heti Közlöny) Weekly Journal (1883)