Hajnal István, a kismartoni hercegi levéltáros
István Hajnal, Keeper of the Ducal Archives in Kismarton (Eisenstadt)

Summary/Abstract: Even at the beginning of the 20th century, the private archives of Hungarian noble families mainly functioned as administrative archives whose primary task was to preserve the titles of their owners and to provide information to the apparatus managing the estate’s economic activities. Following the First World War, several private archives were moved from the detached territories to the new territory of the country due to fears of their appropriation by the new nation states. The professor of the Budapest University of Sciences, István Hajnal, who later became a renowned social historian, served as the keeper of the archives for duke Esterházy’s family from 1922 for some years. It was he who arranged the transfer of the archives from Eisenstad (Kismarton), a small town attached to Austria, to a modern facility in Budapest and opened them before scientific research. Hajnal discovered records relevant to social history in several places on the expansive Esterházy-estate. He attempted to unify the fragmented sources in the new archive facility in Budapest and to provide researchers of social history with access to them. The case study provides several insights into the post-war mentality of the Hungarian political and cultural elites and the practice of the nobility’s patronage of science.

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