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

Budapest Főváros Levéltára (Budapest Municipal Archives)

property, or established after the liberation of Budapest which are derived partly from the nineteenth century. Special mention is due to some important old firms in Budapest, like the building firm Lipót Havel, constructing numerous notable edifices, the commercial firm Manno (nineteenth and twentieth centuries) and the music shop Rózsavölgyi and Co. (1910-1947), as they not only preserved valuable data as to the commercial activity, but also on the political and cultural events and figures of the age. As to the socialist period, not only the papers of the enterprises, but also the balance sheet reports of cca 1800 enterprises, sent to the Hungarian National Bank between 1955 and 1966, supply valuable data. Budapest Municipal Archives also preserves the eighteenth-nineteenth century fragmentary papers of some extinct ecclesiastical organs, formerly active in Budapest almost without exception (5 running metres). The bulk of this material was taken over from the National Széchényi Library in 1953. Also the papers of some families of the same age have come into archival custody (2 running metres). A large part of the personal bequests (cca 35 running metres) derives from advocates, a smaller portion from architects, physicians, engineers, merchants, etc. Outstanding ones are the bequests of Mihály TÁNCSICS (1799-1884) politician, writer, Miklós YBL (1814-1891) the famous architect and Ferenc HARRER (1874-1969), a specialist in town-planning and a leading member of the Metropolitan Public Works Board. We preserve valuable sources in the archival groups of collections. The bulk of the 11 documents before Mohács consists of 8 ones of the guild of the German butchers of Buda and of their guild book led from 1500 to 1529. (Their preservation is due to the fact that the members of the guild fleeing befor the Turks carried them to the parts of the country still under Hungarian rule.) The collection of building plans, totalling 24,000 pieces, deserves special mention; it contains the plans of constructions in Pest and Buda from the 1800s, supervised from the point of view of town-planning, among them those of still standing monuments of art. Beside the plans preserved by city authorities the collection embraces those which have come to us with the papers of some significant architects, or firms, respectively. (Miklós Ybl, Lipót Havel, etc.) Not only a source value, but also a still actual one may be attributed to our collection of plans of 6000 pieces, reaching back to the early eighteenth century, which contains beside plans of plot division and of the drawing of boundaries those of town-planning and the results of the