Dr. Péter Balázs: Guide to the archives of Hungary (Budapest, 1976)

(Central Archives) - Magyar Országos Levéltár (Hungarian National Archives)

the feudal central governmental bodies, supplanted by the permanent establishment of ministerial government, together with their partly archival, partly registering personnel, were united with the records and staff of the "ancient" national archives. The institution, multiplied both in material and personnel, began to use the name of the Hungarian Royal National Archives, dropping the adjective "Royal" only with the change in constitutional form in 1946. The archives remained in Országház Street also after the reorganization, acquiring further premises which were cramped and out-of-date from the beginning. The "palace" of the Archives was built from 1913 to 1917 according to the plans of the architect Samu PETZ on the Bécsikapu Square in Buda; the institution removed there in 1923, and has occupied it as its main building up to this day. One may date the end of the first phase of its bourgeois period, or the beginning of the second to 1922. At about this date it not only removed to the new "palace", but it also changed its authority in this year: while after the abolition of the palatinate it came under the authority of the Ministry of the Interior, now it was subjected to the Ministry of Religious Affairs and Education. The change in the Ministry, exercising direct supervision of the Archives did not only mean an alteration of organization only. It was also a sign of the significant transformation which had already happened in the first phase of the bourgeois period of the Archives' history and which became more emphatic in the second after 1922. In the bourgeois period the emphasis was shifted between the two basic characters of archival work: the scientific one was strengthened gradually, the administrative one was weakened, though not entirely neglected. From being a purely administrative institution the Archives became first an administrative institution active also in scientific work, and then a scientific institution occupied with administrative tasks as well. This transformation was expressed and developed by the change in the supervising body in 1922 and also by attaching the Archives to the National University of Collections, established in the same year. Subordinated to the Ministry of Religious Affairs and Education, but also endowed with a certain autonomy, this body united the national scientific public collections (museums, libraries and the Archives) existing under the name Hungarian National Museum (from 1935) up to the end of 1949.