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

Fejér Megyei Levéltár (Fejér County Archives)

FEJÉR MEGYEI LEVÉLTÁR (FEJÉR COUNTY ARCHIVES) 8001 SZÉKESFEHÉRVÁR, István tér 2. (Pf. 52.) Tel. 121-23 Director: Dr. Gábor FARKAS candidate of the historical sciences There is a department of the Archives at Dunaújváros (2401 DUNAÚJVÁROS,.Lenin tér 1. (Pf. 210.) Tel. 18-197). Its collecting interest covers the city administration, the institutions and economic organs under the direction of the city. The archival material of Székesfehérvár with a long history (a free royal city from the beginning and a royal seat for centuries) and of Fejér county begins with the last third of the seventeenth century. The basic material of the Archives is made up by the records of these two municipalities. The medieval documents have been annihilated. The city was occupied by the Turks in 1543 and recaptured only in 1688. The Turkish records of the one and a half centuries are not preserved in the Archives. As the neighbouring counties were active in this time, the data on the sixteenth-seventeenth centuries of Fejér county may be found in the archives of Komárom, Veszprém, Pest and Győr counties. From the decades after the reorganization of county administration the records are defective, but rich series of them exist from the first decades of the eighteenth century. At the reorganization (1688) city administration established an archival office, the first archivist of the county, however, was employed one hundred years after. The administrative and judicial records and journals were managed together, most of them are unregistered. The arrangement became intensive only after 1870 in both archives. However, the arrangement and simultaneous selection were led by points of view of official management only, so they resulted in the loss of many historical records. It happened at this time that the county papers of whole periods (those between 1849 and 1860 and 1861-1865) have been annihilated. The events of World War II did not cause considerable damage in the archival material. The more painful are the losses in records not taken over by the Archives yet: those of the large estates, industrial enterprises, state and county organs have been destroyed. Historical studies based on archival sources have been published from the early 1870s. Their most important result is the county monograph, published between 1896 and 1905, János KÁROLY -.Fejér vármegye története (History of Fejér County) vols 1 to 5, followed by the studies of Viktor JUHÁSZ on city history, of Dezső REXA on county administrative history and of Miklós SCHNEIDER on the nobility.