Hungary

by Katalin Szende

> Introductory remarks. Historiography
> Genres and Publishing
> Language
> The academic field
> Institutions, organisations, networks
> Bibliography and references
> Acknowledgements

Introductory remarks. Historiography

In the Hungarian tradition the term ‘local history’ (helytörténet) has been used in two senses. Firstly, it comprises a bulk of information concerning the past of a given settlement or other territorial unit that is considerably smaller than a country or a state. Secondly, it denotes a field of historiography which studies the past through phenomena connected to localities, local institutions or personalities, as well as through local projections of nation-wide or worldwide events. The following overview will use the term in the second sense.

The early forms of local history (if we do not consider medieval and early modern town chronicles) reach back to the middle of the eighteenth century. The compilation of the first large-scale topographical dictionaries followed the pan-European movement of the Enlightenment, which fostered an interest in one’s own country and local environs. In these early works history, geography, contemporary politics, and administration feature in the topographical or alphabetical order of the settlements. Their historical part often lacks a critical evaluation of sources, but their description of the contemporary natural environment and public facilities of the given places make them a useful source for the history of their own times. (See the section on Bibliography.) Such topographical dictionaries were published in Latin (the official language of administration until 1844), German, and increasingly in Hungarian, up to the 1880s.

The first real nodal point in local history was the millenary celebrations of the Hungarian Conquest in 1896, when a great number of settlements and other administrative or ecclesiastical units commissioned monographs on their history. Beside works on individual towns, counties, and dioceses, a spectacular series entitled Description of the Counties and Towns of Hungary was launched as a centralized enterprise, co-ordinated by a National Monograph Association, written by a group of distinguished academics and published between 1896 and 1914. Apart from these, only a handful of university historians committed themselves to writing local history; most volumes were compiled by local intellectuals such as teachers, priests, or district doctors. The standard approach of the period was to collect and display all information from the Stone Age until the date of publication or at least up to the 1848/49 revolution in a single-author monograph. These works, which had a strong emphasis on cultural aspects, played an important role in creating and strengthening local identity, and so did the numerous historical and other associations which sprouted up in that period.

A couple of decades later, and especially in the interwar period, geographers and ethnographers elaborated the framework for the so-called human geography and/or settlement geography. This meant the study of geographical regions, often with a historical perspective, demonstrating the importance of interactions between nature and human activity. As a result, descriptions of villages, which were formerly considered and written as parts of county histories, were published in separate volumes, often with a strong sociological flavour. Among academic historians, one school surveyed settlements and their population in the framework of counties, while the other, more economically oriented one concentrated on estates as units of production and administration. However, neither of these new approaches had much effect on the small number of monographs produced in that period for local readership. Those were written by authors even more marginalized from the community of academic historians than before, and this trend went hand in hand with the low prestige of the field.

Between 1945 and 1989, local history was not totally neglected, but was ascribed a different role. It became to a large extent the domain of the ‘Patriotic People’s Front’ (Hazafias Népfront), which was an organization for channeling and controlling local civic activity. In this framework, local history was pursued as part of the so-called ‘knowledge of the homeland’ (honismeret, a similar expression to the German ‘Heimatkunde’) movement. This notion dates back to the second quarter of the nineteenth century, but after World War II it became part of the effort to construct a new, ‘socialist’ identity and local consciousness, and mobilized a hitherto unknown number of people from schoolchildren to pensioners. Within the historical discipline, this period witnessed a growing gap between local and national historiography. The works of amateur authors were hardly ever noted; even good quality local studies or monographs commissioned from leading historians, usually for some sort of anniversary, were often neglected by those who produced the national syntheses. On the other hand, social historians working on individual settlements (mainly towns) used their places of reference mainly as examples for broader phenomena and were so much absorbed by quantifiable data that they did not raise any local interest at all. Other fields of the humanities studying local features, such as archaeology, art history, and ethnography became increasingly professional and better organized. How many of their achievements were integrated into local history depended mostly on personal circumstances.

The period since the fall of communism (1989) has been characterized by a marked revival of interest in local history. The wave of political changes coincided with the millecentenary of the Hungarian Conquest (1996) and the millenary of the establishment of the Hungarian state (2000). These two dates, together with smaller local anniversaries, created a strong demand for erecting local monuments, both in physical and in written (monograph) form. At a rough estimate, works on the history of almost 40% of all the settlements in the country have been published within the past 15 years (see below). In the best cases, co-operation between the local amateur associations and professional historians was achieved; in other instances local prestige considerations prevailed or short deadlines before the anniversaries made proper new research impossible.

The main driving force behind the research on and publication of local history is – as it has been the case during the past two and a half centuries – local patriotism. As a possible reaction to globalization, a stronger attachment to local communities or smaller geographical areas seems to be experienced in our times. The official program of primary and secondary education in history and geography also includes elements of getting acquainted with the history of one’s own settlement, although this goal is reached very unevenly in practice. Local topics play an increasing role among the products of professional historiography, too; a growing number of studies concentrate on one village or town. Nevertheless, fulfilling the ideal demand that local history reveal and explain specific features in the past of local societies and economies, and that there be a mutual influence between local studies and general works on settlement history or national overviews, still remains a task for the future.

A characteristic of Hungarian local history – similarly to general historiography in the country – is the focus on the whole of the Carpathian Basin, the territory of Hungarian statehood up to 1918. With the dismantling of the former framework by the Trianon peace treaty (1920), two-thirds of the area and at least one-third of the ethnic Hungarian population was excluded from the newly aligned borders of the country, and became part of each neighbouring state around it. In addition, several groups or individuals were expelled or emigrated, many of whom still form closed communities and preserve traditions from their former homeland. Therefore, products of local history concerning these territories or population groups should be taken into account when dealing with the Hungarian tradition, and will also be included in the present survey. At the same time, they should also form part of the historiography of their current states (see below in section on Language).

In the case of these minority communities, local history is a strong, almost crucial, element of preserving their identity (e.g. in 2003, a conference with the title ‘Local History and Regional Identity’ was organized in Satu Mare/Szatmár, Romania). For such purposes the Hungarian state provides moral and, occasionally, financial support. However, there is often a shortage of sufficiently trained local intellectuals to carry out research and produce reliable accounts, whereas the historians of the majority nations usually show little concern for the local history of these settlements. A better dialogue between researchers on both sides of the border (for which there are promising initiatives), as well as the official recognition of the cultural autonomy of minority regions may improve the situation in both the human and academic respects.

Genres and Publishing

Volumes on individual local communities (towns and villages) represent the bulk of works published within the framework of local history. Not all of them are termed ‘monographs’ by the authors, and neither do all of them merit this title: they are rather a series of articles or data collections or a mixture of the two, not an academic synthesis of the history of a given settlement. Some of the alternative titles, mostly used for smaller settlements, include: ‘the chronicle of…’; ‘mosaic from…’; ‘chapters/pages from the history of…’; ‘contributions to the past of…’, etc. The titles indicate that the author(s) do not intend to give a full and concise picture. In case of medium-size or bigger settlements (e.g. Sárvár, Gyor, Kaposvár, Szentgotthárd, etc.), volumes of collected studies by renowned historians have also appeared more frequently than proper monographs with a unified editorial concept. Nevertheless, since the 1970s the most important towns (Budapest, Szeged, Debrecen, Miskolc) have produced modern multi-volume biographies, and more are to be published in the near future (Pécs, Szombathely). These works, together with new volumes on smaller towns (Pápa, Siklós, Hódmezovásárhely, Makó, etc.) are often-quoted scholarly works. As a preparatory phase of such enterprises, local history bibliographies of a settlement are often compiled. As probably the best such series, one can refer to the five-volume History of Budapest (Budapest Története) which was published to commemorate the centenary of the unification of the three main constituents of the capital: Buda, Pest, and Óbuda.

A specific but not uniform genre is the ‘local history reader’ (helytörténeti olvasókönyv), which contains either excerpts of sources connected to the place (usually in Hungarian translation), or a selection of articles and parts of previous publications. These anthologies are usually compiled by archivists for educational purposes. Beside products of new research, some of the old titles are also reprinted, partly as rarities for bibliophiles, partly in the absence of considerable new results.

Connected to the millenary celebrations, a series entitled “Book-house of a Hundred Hungarian Villages” (Száz magyar falu könyvesháza) was published between 2000 and 2002. It contains 94 monographs on selected villages within present-day Hungary and six on settlements in the neighbouring countries – all of which were considered significant or representative “of the continuity of Hungarian history”, or which are connected to significant personalities or events in national history. The uniformly designed volumes in this series, commissioned by an editorial board consisting of historians, journalists and other cultural personalities, were intended to give an overview of smaller local units of rural Hungary, as an admitted contrast to the enterprise started in 1896 on counties and towns. In spite of the editorial efforts, the quality of the individual volumes remains uneven, and the monographs do not always convey the viewpoints and achievements of modern history writing. The whole series has also been published on a single CD-ROM by the Arcanum Database Ltd. ( arcadat@axelero.hu, http://www.arcanum.hu ).

The counties as traditional units of regional administration still retain their role in local history. Historical lexicons compiled on a county basis are often edited by the staff of the county archives. Recently, two new series on counties have been issued. The “Historical Place-name Register of Hungary” (Magyarország Történeti Helységnévtára) is being compiled on the basis of the 18th-19th century topographical lexicons (see the section on Historiography) by a research group of the Hungarian Central Statistical Office (HCSO, http://portal.ksh.hu ). So far, 16 volumes have appeared, based on the counties of historic Hungary before 1920. The other series of the HCSO, entitled Historical-Statistical Places-name Register of Hungary (Magyarország Történeti Statisztikai Helységnévtára), contains statistical data related to the counties within the present county borders. Both series can be ordered through http://portal.ksh.hu/pls/portal or kodosz@office.ksh.hu.

The other series, the County Handbooks of Hungary (Magyarország Megyei Kézikönyvei), issued in the late 1990s by the CEBA Publishing House, is based on the modern administrative system, considering only counties in present-day Hungary. With the contribution of archivists, historians and historical geographers, it gives a historical overview and a brief but reliable summary of the past of each settlement.

Monographs on manors, enterprises, associations, churches and other local institutions are not so frequently published. In the period between 1948 and 1989, factory histories were written, usually embedded into the history of the labour movement. Histories of parishes or dioceses are rarely written these days; the earlier such volumes are not free from confessional pride or bias. Monographs on churches tend to be art historical in character, but also utilize the available archival data. A series of small booklets on individual monuments, collections, or the sights of a settlement is being issued by an association named Tájak-Korok-Múzeumok Egyesület (‘Landscapes, Ages, Museums Association’ http://tkme.freeweb.hu ) which is also combined with a movement to visit as many of these places as possible. These booklets are usually written by scholars (archaeologists, art historians, historians) who have done research on the spot and thus give first-hand up-to-date information. They always contain a German or English summary, and the most visited sites also have a full-text foreign-language edition. So far more than 700 such booklets have been issued, of which almost 500 are currently available ( tkmets@hu.inter.net ). A similar but less scholarly series under the title ‘Small library on the knowledge of the homeland’ (Honismereti Kiskönyvtár) on the Hungarian settlements of Slovakia is published as a private enterprise in Komarno.

Annuals and other periodicals are partly published by local history associations, partly by local museums and archives (see below, in the section on Institutions). The central journal on local history is Honismeret, published six times a year by the Honismereti Szövetség (Association for the Knowledge of the Homeland). Its main columns include ‘Anniversaries’, ‘Knowledge of the homeland and Europe’, ‘Schools and the knowledge of the homeland’, ‘My village – my town’, ‘Traditions’, and so on. The contributors include academics, but are to a greater extent amateurs: teachers and other local intellectuals, often from outside the borders of present-day Hungary. The journal also functions as a newsletter with an up-to-date chronicle and personal news of the Association, and has an extensive section on book reviews and a bibliographical list on recent local history publications, including titles of articles in local periodicals. A full text on-line version of the journal, with back issues from 1999 onwards can be accessed at http://www.vjrktf.hu/honisme.htm.

Other periodicals, published 4-6 times a year, are connected to local funding and initiative. Some of them contain articles from various disciplines, including the natural sciences (e.g. Debreceni Szemle, Vasi Szemle), literary pieces (e.g. Pécsi Szemle, Szabolcs-Szatmári Szemle); others are more strictly historical in character (Soproni Szemle, Vasi Helytörténeti és Honismereti Közlemények). On the yearbooks of museums and archives see the section on Institutions.

Museum exhibitions, especially in town and county museums, are special forms of publishing and publicizing local history. Permanent displays intending to give a full overview ‘from the stone age up to our own times’ were obligatorily arranged in the 1970s and 1980s and are used regularly in teaching, but only a few of them have been updated and even fewer have a proper catalogue. Temporary exhibits on recent archaeological findings or new acquisitions or centered on a local anniversary or other thematic focus are more attractive. These are better provided with catalogues, which can also be traced on the museum websites (see below).

On the book market, there is no single commercial publishing house that specializes in local history, rather small local publishers take up such tasks out of local patriotism. Many books or booklets appear privately published or with the financial support of the local administration. The field is extremely fragmented and it can be difficult to find and purchase local publications. Public commission or sponsorship is strongly connected to local or national anniversaries. Hardly any works are privately commissioned, and private sponsorship is usually restricted to financing the publication of one’s own work.

Concerning electronic editions, the central role is played by the Arcanum Database Ltd., which issues CD-ROM or DVD editions of archival sources and inventories, the first ordinance survey from the 1780s, handbooks on genealogy and heraldry, national and local history journals, etc. For a full list of their publications, see http://www.arcanum.hu/index.html.

The readership or audience of local history publications is quite mixed and hard to define. This question generally does not form a decisive part of the definition of local history as summarized above, but should be taken into consideration. Although one should be cautious with generalizations, one cannot overlook the gap between amateurs and academics; the former read more of the colourful and less serious works, whereas the latter usually confine themselves to more scholarly publications. Among academic historians, medievalists tend to pay greater attention to local works; modernists show less interest unless they have personal connections to the place.

Language

In accordance with the expected audience of the genre, local history in Hungary is published almost exclusively in Hungarian. Exceptions are:

• works on ethnic groups other than Hungarians, especially on Germans. These are connected to the German population of historic Hungary. They live either within the present borders (see the website of Landesselbstverwaltung der Ungarndeutschen: http://www.ldu.hu, with several historical publications) or in small numbers in their homelands in present-day Romania and Slovakia. Most of them, however, were expelled (1946) or emigrated and settled in Germany. The latter group has its own local associations, a historical institute in Heidelberg ( http://www.siebenbuergen-institut.de and http://www.sibiweb.de/aksl ), and a special library called Siebenürgische Bibliothek in Gundelsheim. The Institut publishes a journal and other works on local history. Another useful guide to German publications on the region is the catalogue of the Herder Institute, a centre for the history of East Central Europe ( http://www.Herder-Institut.de ).

Some publications concerning Croatian, Slovak, Serbian, etc. minorities in Hungary are published bi-lingually or have extensive summaries.

• works of general interest, especially for tourists: guidebooks with historical sections, picture books, books of old postcards, etc. See the above mentioned booklet series.
• works of interest for a special field of study: archaeology, art history, monument protection, etc., which often summarize the general history of the locality.
• works for political propaganda purposes. Especially German publications from the 1930s and early 1940s need to be treated with reservations.
• In more recent works, e.g. in the above-mentioned Hundred Hungarian Villages series, short (2-3 pages) German and/or English summaries are sometimes included.

Language represents an increasing problem in local histories in the successor-states of former Hungary. While the older generations spoke all the relevant languages of a locality, this bi- or tri-lingualism is disappearing nowadays. This results in a strong discontinuity of historical tradition: the younger generation of ethnic-majority historians cannot read the old Hungarian works (and many of the sources), while researchers in present-day Hungary often neglect the recent Slovak, Romanian, Croatian, etc. publications and only refer back to works from before 1918.

The problem of language comes up constantly concerning place-names – a basic feature in local history. Several settlements in the Carpathian Basin have had two, three or more names throughout their history. For instance, present-day Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia is called Pozsony in Hungarian, Pressburg in German, the early modern Slovak name was Prešporok, the Latin was Posonium or Pisonium, but the humanists also used the term Istropolis. A dictionary of the different name forms was compiled by György Lelkes, Magyar helységnév-azonosító szótár [Dictionary for identifying Hungarian place-names], Baja, 1998, on the basis of the 1913 official register of settlements. The introduction (in Hungarian) and small excerpts from the book can be accessed through http://lazarus.elte.hu/hun/maps/1910/talma.

Almost all websites mentioned in this survey have an English or German version, or at least a starting page. However, the databases linked to these websites are usually in Hungarian.

The academic field

Universities with local history as a defined field of teaching and research are rather scarce. There is no program offering a special degree in local history; students become acquainted with local works within the framework of national history, archives studies, modern museum studies or medieval and post-medieval archaeology. From time to time, depending on student interest and participation, one-term seminars are launched. E.g. the Pázmány Péter Catholic University ( http://www.ppke.hu ) has organized courses in co-operation with the Office for the Protection of Cultural Heritage ( http://www.koh.hu ) to train history students in background research on sites with protected monuments. At the Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Department of Auxiliary Sciences, first-year archivist students have to take a course on the historical geography of Hungary, where one of the requirements is to write a term paper in the field of local history. This has primarily methodological aims, but can yield considerable research results as well. At the Department of Medieval Studies of the Central European University, in the framework of an MA program in medieval studies ( http://www.ceu.hu/medstud ), a more general course on local history is offered from time to time. This has a more comparative angle, due to the international student body of this university. Local history is also taught at the Department of Architectural History of the Budapest Technical University. Architects specializing in the protection of monuments learn how to fit their plans for the reconstruction of protected buildings into the historical context of a given settlement. Some of these architects write their theses on local history, with special emphasis on the protection of local heritage. The Department can be reached at http://www.eptort.bme.hu. From this website theses written in foreign languages as well as the issues of the periodical Architectura Hungariae can also be downloaded.

Some universities outside the capital had or have projects on writing an up-to-date multi-volume monograph on the history of their own town (Miskolc, Pécs, Debrecen, Szeged); the latter two have also initiated monographs on several smaller neighbouring settlements. These projects are not so closely connected to the educational program, but form part of the academic activity of faculty members. No systematic university-based courses are available for interested amateurs.

Historical demography and family structure is researched intensively in the Népességtudományi Kutatóintézet (Demographic Research Institute) of the Hungarian Central Statistical Office (contact: kshnki@mailop.ksh.hu ). In some cases, researchers from these institutions are commissioned to write chapters in local history anthologies, but usually their work does not find its way to an interested local readership. The Teleki László Fund (Teleki László Alapítvány, http://www.tla.hu ) is active in collecting, processing, and mapping statistical data on Hungarian settlements outside the borders of Hungary, and it carries out research on ethnicity and heritage issues.

Linguistic studies related to local history deal with collecting and locating historic place-names inside built-in areas or in the fields around them, thus identifying sites of deserted settlements and other landscape features. This work is coordinated by the Hungarian Society for Linguistics (Magyar Nyelvtudományi Társaság, http://www.c3.hu/~magyarnyelv/bevezeto/Tarsasag ) and carried out by the county museums and archives. The publication series “Geographical Names of … County” is published by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Etymological research on historic place-names is carried out by the Department of Hungarian Linguistics of the University of Debrecen (Debreceni Egyetem, Magyar Nyelvtudományi Tanszék, http://mnytud.arts.klte.hu, electronic access to their database on placenames: http://nevarchivum.klte.hu ). Disseminating reliable results in this field is important also because local monographs often begin with the origin and interpretation of the settlement’s name.

As mentioned above, archaeology, art history, and ethnography/social anthropology are strongly involved in researching the past of individual localities. Since the subject of these fields of research is more strongly connected to local materials than that of the historians, who often work in centralized archives, scholars of these disciplines often establish a better co-operation with local collectors, volunteers or associations than historians do.

Institutions, organisations, networks

The Honismereti Szövetség (Association for the Knowledge of the Homeland) and its periodical is mentioned above. The movement behind this still exists, freed from its former ideological bias, but has lost much of its mass character. Due to greater social mobility, local ties and interest are getting weaker. Primary and secondary schools can form a basis that may complement the generally elderly membership of local associations. Often centered on a notable building (e.g. a castle), these organisations carry out both practical tasks in protecting and embellishing the local environment, and research into the past of the settlement.

There is no institute specializing in local history in Hungary. Some of the regional committees of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences ( http://www2.mta.hu ) have a working group on local history, e.g. in Pécs. Authors of local studies can find experts for consultation in the district archives or museums which are organized on a county basis. These institutions form the primary basis of local history, due to both their capacities as repositories of most of the source material and their professionally trained staff. The National Archives of Hungary (Magyar Országos Levéltár) can be reached at http://www.natarch.hu; the same website gives guidelines on and links to the sources on the research of parish registers and genealogy. A full-text German version of a survey on Hungarian archives by L. Blazovich and V. Müller (compiled in 1996, so some addresses and phone numbers may be dated) is accessible through kvtlinux.lib.uni-miskolc.hu/lib/archive/kiadv/magylevelt/index.htm. The portal http://www.bacs-kiskun-leveltar.hu/ has links to individual archives. A special website for sources after 1945 is http://www.archivnet.hu, which also has a column on Hungarian minorities abroad. The county and municipal museums of Hungary are linked to the website of the Hungarian National Museum (Magyar Nemzeti Múzeum, http://www.hnm.hu ) or can be surveyed through http://www.ace.hu (Archeocomp Association). The museums and archives practically all have their own publications in the form of yearbooks, monographs, exhibition catalogues, source editions, etc.

Libraries contain secondary sources related to local history, although some manuscripts by local authors from past centuries may also have been deposited there. The current Library Act makes it compulsory for all public libraries on town- and county-level to collect pubilcations on local history and to maintain a special local history section, administered by an expert curator. Especially noteworthy is the collection of the National Széchényi Library (Országos Széchényi Könyvtár, http://www.oszk.hu, with a good search program) which is entitled to complimentary copies of every single printed work published in the country and also collects materials published abroad relating to Hungary. The standard and the most recent publications are accessible on open shelves. The county libraries do not have a central website, but are linked to each other and can be found through links from, e.g. http://www.dfmk.hu.

Research on the history of the capital, Budapest (and its predecessors) takes pride of place within all disciplines and types of institutions mentioned above. This fact is partly connected to the overweight of Budapest in the whole country (with ca. 20% of the total population living here), and partly to the high number of well qualified academics working in various institutions of the capital. The three main centres holding the primary sources and serving as foci of local history research are the Municipal Archives of Budapest (Budapest Fováros Levéltára, http://www.bparchiv.hu ); the Budapest History Museum (Budapesti Történeti Múzeum, ( http://www.btm.hu ); and the Municipal ‘Szabó Ervin’ Library (Fovárosi Szabó Ervin Könyvtár, http://www.fszek.hu ). The latter maintains a special Budapest Collection (Budapest Gyujtemény), and all three institutions have several series and occasional publications (see their websites).

Cultural heritage is administered through the Office for the Protection of Cultural Heritage (Kulturális Örökségvédelmi Hivatal, http://www.koh.hu ) which has a central office and a system of local inspectorates who both control local building activities and act as consultants in the case of heritage objects under private ownership. Its central office has a large collection of photographs, plans, and sketches made during the restoration of buildings all over the Carpathian Basin.

Bibliography and references

The Magyar Nemzeti Bibliográfia [Hungarian National Bibliography] is a general bibliography that contains all publications related to Hungary, and thus includes local history, too. It is published each year in CD-ROM format. The bibliography of books (Könyvek bibliográfiája) can also be found under http://www.oszk.hu/mnbkb/ .

Domokos Kosáry, Culture and Society in Eighteenth-century Hungary. Budapest, 1987. (on the first works)

Antal Bodor and István Gazda, Magyarország honismereti irodalma, 1527–1944. [Literature on the knowledge of homeland in Hungary] Budapest, 1984. (reprint edition of a work first published in 1944, with additions)

Tibor Csomor (ed.), Magyarország. Honismereti bibliográfia [Hungary: Bibliography on the knowledge of the of the homeland]. Vol. 1. Budapest, 1972. (bibliography arranged by various geographical regions, counties and settlements, on present-day Hungary, except Budapest) Vol. 2. Budapest, 1973 (on Budapest).

József Zoltán (ed.), Budapest történetének bibliográfiája. [Bibliography of the history of Budapest], Vols. 1–7. Budapest: Fovárosi Szabó Ervin Könyvtár, 1963–1974. Online electronic version extended up to 1983: http://database.fszek.hu:2002

Domokos Kosáry, Bevezetés Magyarország történetének forrásaiba és irodalmába [An introduction to the sources and literature of the history of Hungary]. I. Általános rész [General Part]

Vol. 1. Könyvtárak és bibliográfiák [Libraries and bibliographies] Budapest, 2000.,( with a special section on local history bibliographies, pp. 135-149, text in Hungarian, but with entries in several languages

Vol. 2. Országos jellegu levéltárak és forrásközlések [Archives of a national character and source publications] Budapest, 2003. (centred on the material of the National Archives of Hungary which for the period before 1918 comprises the entire Carpathian Basin.)

Vol. 3. Megyei levéltárak és forrásközlések [County archives and source publications] (in preparation, to be published in 2005.)

Further volumes planned on municipal, family, and church archives, as well as on foreign archives with materials related to Hungary are in preparation. At present, this series only exists in a printed version, but medium-term plans include a CD-ROM or on-line publication.

There are several publications (mainly articles in journals, but also monographs) on sources and methods of local history. Those published before the 1980s are mostly dated. Many of them up to 2000 feature in the above bibliographies. Some more recent examples include:

László Solymosi, “A helytörténet fontosabb középkori forrásainak kutatása és hasznosítása” [Research and use of the most important medieval sources of local history], Történelmi Szemle 19 (1976) pp. 123–155, in Hungarian , with comprehensive footnotes.

Miklós Bényei, Helytörténet. Iskola. Könyvtár [Local history. School. Library] Budapest, 1997. (methodological handbook with bibliography, pp. 89–111.), in Hungarian

Acta Papensia, Pápa, 2003/1–2. ed. József Hudi (publishes the papers of the conference entitled “Questions of writing local history monographs”, Veszprém, 21 November 2002. Includes overviews and bibliographies of the local history monographs published in counties of Transdanubia; in Hungarian, with a one-page introduction in English)

Várostörténet, helytörténet. Elmélet és módszertan. [Urban history, local history. Theory and methodology] ed. József Vonyó. Pécs, 2003. (Publishes the papers of the conference held under the same title in 1999, with contributors from Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, Austria; table of contents in German and English.)

Acknowledgements

Katalin Szende is assistant professor at the Central European University, Budapest, and general editor of the local history journal Soproni Szemle. She can be contacted at szendek@ceu.hu. The author acknowledges useful comments given by Borbála Bak, associate professor at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest ( bakborbala@freemail.hu ) and György Rácz, assistant professor at Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Piliscsaba ( racz@btk.ppke.hu ) and Judith Rasson’s ( rassonj@ceu.hu ) help in improving the clarity and fluency of the text.

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