Slovak National Archives
Slovak National Archives

Summary/Abstract: Legal predecessors of the Slovak National Archives until 1952 The organisation of archives, as we know it today, began to be set up only in the 1950s. Slovakia was not a sovereign state or independent administrative unit within the Kingdom of Hungary until the beginning of the 20th century, so this was also the reason why any kind of central or national archive did not exist. Certainly, various municipal and church archives were created on Slovak territory a long time ago. Significant changes in the organisation of archiving in Slovakia did not occur during the first decade of existence of the Czechoslovak republic, although immediately after the establishment of the new republic there were proposals for the establishment of a kind of central archive in Slovakia. Jan Bedřich Novák, director of the Czech Land Archive, was the first to make a proposal in November 1918 and, according to him, a general state archive for Slovakia should have been established. Its task was to receive documents related to Slovakia from the central archives and offices from Budapest. The second proposal was drawn up in February 1919 by the Director of the Archives of the Ministry of Interior, Ladislav Klicman.

• Details
• Contents