On June 11, ten teachers having been rewarded with the Diploma of Merit for Benedictine Education were introduced to the riches of our Archives after the prize-giving ceremony. On the following day, teachers and PhD-students of language history – headed by Rudolf Szentgyörgyi – from the Faculty of Humanities, Eötvös Loránt University visited us. During the irregular class, the doctoral candidates also made presentations.

On 7 June, the colleagues of the cultural section (library, archives, museum, cultural office) of Pannonhalma went on a day excursion in Veszprém, where they visited the castle district under reconstruction. In the cathedral, the organist Attila Dankos talked about and played the organ, then Veronika Nagy, the Director of the Blessed Gizella Archiepiscopal Collection showed us around in the cathedral.

In May, many groups visited our archives. On 23 May, the group of the Benedictine School of Meschede – in connection with the Benedictine Boarding School of Pannonhalma for about four decades – were hosted in the form of an irregular class of history.

During spring, within the framework of the multi-disciplinary research-programme entitled “Kings, Saints, Monasteries”, a planned excavation took place in the Archabbey’s area. The excavation was headed by Ágoston Takács, a doctoral candidate of Eötvös Loránd University, Department of Archaeological Sciences.

The 6th Scriptorium-Conference was held at the Archiepiscopal College of Veszprém on 10-11 May. The series of conferences focus on manuscripts, especially ecclesiastical manuscripts. The reports presented during the programme are somehow related to the concept of manuscripts (codices; handwritten works, records, devotional literature, hymnbooks, teachers’ records; glosses and marginalia in works – mainly in incunabili or old printed books – kept in library collections; and introducing the manuscript stock of the collections, etc.).

On 21 April 2023, in Budapest, in the House of Dialogue, a workshop-conference was held on the occasion of the 250th anniversary of the Jesuits’ dissolution. The aim of the conference organised by the Archives of the Hungarian Province of the Society of Jesus and the Ferenc Faludi Jesuit Academy was to make a survey of what 18th-century Jesuit archival documents – having been scattered during the dissolution – are kept in larger secular and some ecclesiastical collections. The reports were presented by the representatives of the invited archives and libraries.

A group of MA-students of history from the University of Pécs headed by professors Gergely Kiss and Gábor Barabás visited the Archabbey on 20 April. Our archivists showed them around and made them acquainted with the monastery. Besides the Basilica, the cloister and the library, our guests had a look at the sacristy and the refectory, too, then in a longer programme, they were introduced to the riches of the Arpadian age kept in our Archives.

The final of the 22nd Cultura Nostra History Competition of the Carpathian Basin was organised in the Archabbey on 4 April. More than 150 teams took part in the contest’s first two on-line rounds. The best ten teams of them qualified for the final. The final order evolved after a three-hour-long trial. At the end of the day, the pupils and the teachers training them visited the millennial monastery’s church, cloister, library, and refectory, then they had a look at competition-related 18th-century sources besides mediaeval charters and codices in our Archives.

On 24 February 2023, on the occasion of the Memorial Day for the Victims of Communism, the Institute for National Heritage – with a commemorative plaque and a plot-stone – marked the resting place of the religious, who died in the Social Home of Pannonhalma. The list of names of the religious buried in the plot can be checked on the Institute’s homepage.

On 29 November, the archivists’ autumnal conference of the Centre for National Catholic Collections was organised with the title “The Lamps of the Wise Virgins” discussing the history of church estates. Zoltán Boros (archivist, Pannonhalma) gave a talk on the latest results of the historical research focusing on Benedictine estates. Krisztina Tóth, the delegate of the Hungarian Archival Agency in the Vatican gave an introductory talk.