COURAGE

connecting collections

The universal convention of Hungarian Lutherans decided in 1802 to establish the archives of the Lutheran Church in Pest, the Archivum Generalis Ecclesiae. For one hundred years it was located in a school building of the Lutheran congregation on Deák square in the city of Pest. In 1908, it moved to the Church centre at Üllői Road 24, district VIII of Budapest. (Now the building is under reconstruction, and the archive is provisionally being held in the building of the City Archives of Budapest.) The material of the archive has been expanded by national collections, and in addition to the documents of church administration, many congregations and individuals have donated their documents to the archive. Because of the reorganization of church administration, the materials of the episcopal offices of the four Lutheran districts were delivered to the archive. The documents of dioceses, of the nationalized evangelistic higher and secondary schools (the secondary school of Fasor, the Faculty of Theology in Sopron, and the Academy of Law in Miskolc) and the materials of dissolved church congregations were also collected. The bequests of many important ecclesiastical figures were acquired by the archives. Now, the archives preserve about 1,000 meters of material. Special catalogues were made for materials concerning the history of congregations and the biographical data of priests.

The movement Public Against Violence (Verejnosť proti násiliu, VPN) was established on November 19, 1989 at a meeting of cultural and academic workers in Bratislava as a spontaneous reaction of the cultural and scientific community to the crackdown by security forces against a peaceful demonstration of students on November 17, 1989, at Národní třída in Prague.

Public Against Violence was established as a free, open, independent association of citizens without binding rules for their activities, without the authorization or consent of the competent authorities, and thus without legal entity.

The Museum of the 1863 Uprising was established in 2009 as part of the Kėdainiai Regional Museum. It is housed in the restored mansion of Baron Stanislovas Šilingas, who was of German descent, built in 1793. The museum holds unique items from the 1863 uprising, as well as various historical displays to attract visitors, especially groups from secondary schools in Lithuania.

The Museum of the Occupation of Latvia 1940-1991 is a private institution. It was established in 1993 by a group of 11 people, who founded the Occupation Museum Foundation (OMF), now the Occupation Museum Association (OMB), to establish, administer and finance the Museum of the Occupation of Latvia. As a private museum, the Museum of the Occupation is financially, and thus politically, independent. The mission of the museum is as follows: ‘to identify, research, elucidate and commemorate the wrongs committed by foreign occupying powers against the state and the people of Latvia from 1940 to 1991; to preserve the historical memory of the Latvian people about the occupation period; and to inform and educate the people of Latvia and other nations about the history and the consequences of the occupation period, in order to strengthen the Latvian state and its place among the free and democratic nations of the world.’