Press Room

March 21, 2024: Visegrad Scholarship at OSA Presentations
Posted: 14/March/2024
We are happy to announce the next presentations of the Visegrad Scholarship at OSA. Join the event in the Archivum, or online! The presentations will be held at 11:00 CET on Thursday, March 21, in the Meeting Room of the Blinken OSA Archivum, and online. 
 
Fotó: Nemzeti Filmintézet (NFI)
Posted: 07/March/2024
Almási Marathon - Tamás Almási: Ózd-Series A two-day screening series and audience meeting in Hungarian. As a tribute to the Almási legacy, the eight-part Ózd series will be screened on March 14-15, 2024, never shown all at once. The program starts on Thursday, March 14, 2024, at 4:00 p.m. On Friday, March 15, 2024, we will continue at 10 am, and at 4:20 p.m. there will be a discussion with the director Tamás Almási and Lóránt Stőrh.
 
(Image: Vika Popova. Memorial Society / Facebook)
Posted: 28/February/2024
We, members of the Blinken OSA Archivum, express our admiration for Oleg Orlov; for his many years of struggle for human rights, and for his fearlessness in front of the regime. The Blinken OSA Archivum, a long-time ally of Memorial and a repository of documents related to the histories and aftermaths of grave human rights violations, endorses the statement issued by 33 human rights organizations, and condemns the sentence.
 
Photo of a clandestine priest, The Keston Digital Archive, Baylor University
Posted: 21/February/2024
We are happy to announce the next presentations of the Visegrad Scholarship at OSA. Join the event in the Archivum, or online! The presentations will be held at 14:00 PM on Tuesdady, February 27, in the Meeting Room of the Blinken OSA Archivum, and online. 
 
Raising of the Ukrainian Flag on July 24, 1990 (HU OSA 300 Records of RFE/RL RI)
Posted: 19/February/2024
On the 10th anniversary of the annexation of Crimea and the second anniversary of Russia’s full-scale war of aggression it led to against Ukraine, the Blinken OSA Archivum raises awareness of the Ukrainian people’s successful struggle for independence in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The new Curated Collection titled Winning Freedom: Ukraine, 1989–1991, published today, reconstructs three crucial years in Ukraine’s transition process based on archival documents from the Archivum’s holdings.
 
Figure of Alexei Navalny at the Fearless exhibition (photo: Dániel Végel)
Posted: 16/February/2024
“Alexei Navalny (1976–2024) Russian dissident politician and anti-corruption activist. He came into international prominence for organizing demonstrations against President Putin and his government, running for office and advocating anti-corruption reforms.”
 
Making Public History – HIPS Internship Wraps up at the Blinken OSA Archivum
Posted: 13/February/2024
What do the following have in common?   an audio walking tour and exhibition about the prewar nightlife in the Jewish District of Budapest  an interactive online novel set in 1956, during the revolution in Hungary  a poetic documentary film about the lives of Socialist monuments in Memento Park  an online exhibition amending the controversial museum House of Terror concerning the history of the transition from Horthy’s regime to the Arrow Cross rule between 1920 and 1944 
 
An American in the Soviet and Russian Archives by Alfred J. Rieber
Posted: 08/February/2024
PUBLIC LECTURE An American in the Soviet and Russian Archives by Alfred J. Rieber, University Emeritus Professor at Central European University (CEU) When: Thursday, February 15, 2024, at 6:00 p.m. Where: Blinken OSA Archivum, Research Room, 1051 Budapest, Arany J. u. 32. Online: https://ceu-edu.zoom.us/j/95634973722?pwd=ZmRZc2MwVmFqcUxpYXlMR2dSTlFydz09
 
Wikimedia commons
Posted: 07/February/2024
We are happy to announce the next presentation of the Visegrad Scholarship at OSA. Join the event in the Archivum, or online by following the link below!  The presentation will be held at 2:00 p.m. on Tuesday, February 13, in the Meeting Room of the Blinken OSA Archivum, and online. The Zoom link of the meeting is: https://ceu-edu.zoom.us/j/92097409782?pwd=ci9LUG4rcXRyZHFKSHlrQ3pQakpWUT09   The silence of saying no. Narrating desertion in the Yugoslav wars. by Dr. Milica Popović, Sciences Po CERI
 
HU OSA 429 Photos of vocational school students by Gusztáv Hámos
Posted: 01/February/2024
On January 29, the Blinken OSA Archivum organized a workshop at its Budapest headquarters with sociologists and other social scientists—teachers, students, and researchers—exploring the possibilities of using the Mihály Csákó Personal Papers in education and research. Participants included senior staff and students from the Eötvös Loránd University’s Faculty of Social Sciences and the Centre for Social Sciences. The workshop was moderated by Iván Székely, Senior Research Fellow and Counsellor at the Blinken OSA Archivum.
 
Media Art Exhibition: Darling, Let Me Hold You!
Posted: 29/January/2024
The Finnish Institute in Budapest FinnAgora and Blinken OSA Archivum present an audiovisual art exhibition: Darling, Let Me Hold You! The exhibition is organized as part of the Finnish Film Days, Finn Filmnapok, and presents audiovisual art by six Finnish artists. The theme of the exhibition is human connection.
 
Posted: 03/January/2024
On the 80th anniversary of the Hungarian Shoah, two related events will take place at the CEU Nádor Street building (entrance: 1051 Budapest, Nádor utca 15) on Wednesday, January 10, 2024. At 4 p.m., the working group of historians of the CEU Democracy Institute will present Viktor Karády and István Kemény’s book Zsidóság a magyar nemzetépítésben a numerus clausus előtt és azután [Jewishness in Hungarian nation-building before and after the Numerus Clausus]. At 6 p.m., András Böröcz’s kinetic sculpture Noisemaker, commissioned and supported by the Polgár Foundation, will be presented by art historian András Rényi in the presence of the artist. (A regular exhibitor in Budapest, András Böröcz has been living in Brooklyn since 1984. Further information on the future programs of the Noisemaker will be available at the following link: https://www.facebook.com/2bgaleria/?locale=hu_HU The event is free, but registration is required: https://forms.office.com/e/t7u1xP80JR Venue – Book Launch: 1051 Budapest, Nádor u. 15, Auditorium B. Venue – Exhibition opening: 1051 Budapest, Nádor u. 15, Atrium  
 
In Visible Presence
Posted: 02/January/2024
In Visible Presence: Soviet Afterlives in Family Photos (MIT Press, 2023) by Oksana Sarkisova (CEU) and Olga Shevchenko (Williams College) An absorbing exploration of Soviet-era family photographs that demonstrates the singular power of the photographic image to command attention, resist closure, and complicate the meaning of the past. Date/Time: January 18, 2024, 6:00 p.m. Venue: Blinken OSA, Arany Janos u. 31, Budapest 1051 Moderator and discussant: Róza Tekla Szilágyi, Director of Eidolon Center for Everyday Photography. Organizers: Blinken OSA Archivum and Institute for Advanced Studies at CEU
 
December 13, 2023: Visegrad Scholarship at OSA Presentation
Posted: 11/December/2023
We are happy to announce the next presentations of the Visegrad Scholarship at OSA. Join the event in the Archivum, or online! The presentations will be held at 11:00 on Thursday, December 13, in the Meeting Room of the Blinken OSA Archivum, and online. 
 
International Federation of Persons with Physical Disability (FIMITIC)
Posted: 10/December/2023
December 10 is Human Rights Day, observing this year the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This milestone celebration comesis just a week after the UN’s International Day of Persons with Disabilities on December 3. On this double occasion, we are happy to announce that the records of the International Federation of Persons with Physical Disability have been included to Blinken OSA Archivum’s holdings, marking a significant expansion in our collection focus.
 
Letter invitation from Romani Union to journalist Anna Koptová from former Czech
Posted: 30/November/2023
We are happy to announce the next presentation of the Visegrad Scholarship at OSA. Join the event in the Archivum, or online! The presentations will be held at 11 AM on Thursday, December 7, in the Meeting Room of the Blinken OSA Archivum, and online. 
 
Blinken OSA Archivum catalog
Posted: 19/November/2023
Budapest is celebrating the 150th anniversary of its unification today. The Blinken OSA Archivum, a unit of CEU, has been operating in Budapest since 1995. During this time, our colleagues launched projects like Budapest100, Fortepan, or the Yellow Star Houses website. For the capital’s 150th birthday, we have prepared several gifts. Today, we unveil our renewed online catalog, also including two new, Budapest-related collections: the archive of Budapest Week, a weekly magazine capturing the vibrant life of Budapest in the 1990s, and István Bartók’s street photographs of Budapest in the 2000s. Next week, the Verzió Film Festival, founded 20 years ago by the Archivum staff, devotes a special section to documentaries about the city.
 
Mihály Csákó (1941–2019)
Posted: 19/November/2023
Mihály Csákó would have celebrated his 82nd birthday today, on November 19. We are pleased to announce that, with archival processing done, the Mihály Csákó Personal Papers are now accessible in the Research Room, and its detailed catalogue entry can be browsed online! The rich collection revolves around topics like sociology of education, research on apprentices, democratic civic education, computerization in schools, trade union movements and, at the same time, Csákó’s democratic opposition activities and teaching work.
 
Blinken OSA Archivum invites applications for the Digital Archivist position
Posted: 16/November/2023
The Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives (Blinken OSA Archivum) at Central European University (CEU) based primarily in Budapest, but with teaching tasks in Vienna, Austria invites applications for the Digital Archivist position.  Blinken OSA Archivum is part of Central European University (www.ceu.edu), one of the most multinational graduate institutions in Europe, engaged primarily in the humanities and social sciences. The Archivum is a complex institution of memory that supports scholarship, is engaged in research, is the initiator of high visibility public programs, and manages the Archives and Evidentiary Practices specialization at the History and Legal Studies Departments at CEU. The Archivum is also an “archive of last resort”, the archive of (politically and otherwise) endangered collections. Blinken OSA Archivum hopes to attract a unique intellectual who is ready to experiment and to take calculated professional and intellectual challenges; who is passionate about new archival and library theories, technologies, trends in digital media, digital humanities, and open access; and who is highly knowledgeable about emerging IT solutions.
 
Where are we headed? Verzió 20 – November 22-29, 2023
Posted: 15/November/2023
Why do violent and sometimes deadly initiation rituals persist in the Belarussian army? What did the Taliban do with $7 billion worth of American military equipment? Who owns the ocean depths? What makes someone male or female? These are some of the questions explored at the Verzió Human Rights Documentary Film Festival, held from 22–29 November, in Budapest and six other cities across Hungary.
 
Gyula Konfár: Resistance in the Camp (Prisoners of the Concentration Camp), 1965
Posted: 12/November/2023
Blinken OSA Archivum, Galeria Centralis September 14 – December 3, 2023 Exhibition opening: September 14, Thursday, 6:00 p.m. (The event is held in Hungarian.) Opening remarks by: István Rév, Director, Blinken OSA Archivum Eszter Susán, Program Manager, Jewish Life Program, Tom Lantos Institute Opening speech by: András Kovács, Professor, CEU Jewish Studies Program Curator: Daniel Véri Graphic designer: Sarolta Ágnes Erdélyi, Hajnalka Illés Exhibiting artists: Tibor Barabás, Gyula Hincz, György Jovánovics, János Kass, Béla Kondor, György Konecsni, Gyula Konfár, József Péri, Endre Szász
 
Photo: Lenke Szilágyi
Posted: 10/November/2023
A pan-European survey on access to archives, commissioned by the Council of Europe, identifies novel challenges and outlines opportunities for improvement. Iván Székely, Senior Research Fellow at the Blinken OSA Archivum, played a key role in the study, and co-authored its Summary Report, now available online.
 
Photo: Budapesti Corvinus Egyetem / Michael Daramola
Posted: 07/November/2023
We, members of the CEU Democracy Institute, the CEU Institute for Advanced Study and the Blinken OSA Archivum, express our solidarity with Dr. Zoltán Ádám, recently dismissed from his position as associate professor of economics at Corvinus University. Justice for Dr. Zoltán Ádám!
 
Fortepan / Budapest Főváros Levéltára. Levéltári jelzet: HU_BFL_XV_19_c_11
Posted: 27/October/2023
The Audiovisual Unit of the Blinken OSA Archivum has started archiving the films of the Hungarian–Soviet Friendship Society. The hundreds of reels of Soviet propaganda and educational films saved by György Gadányi after the 1989 regime compose an extraordinary collection of historical documents, which will be accessible to the general public.
 
Visegrad Scholarship at OSA
Posted: 26/October/2023
In the context of the current wars, many analysts have proclaimed the end of Pax Americana, bringing about tectonic geopolitical shifts and either the final conclusion or the confirmation of the Cold War and its dichotomies. The Blinken OSA Archivum in Budapest, Hungary, invites researchers, journalists, and artists to reflect on the Lessons from the Cold War by taking cues from the Archivum’s collections, one of the world’s largest holdings on the history of the Cold War and of human rights violations.
 
31.08.1980, Wroclaw, Poland. Strike at the tram depot. (Archiwum Fundacji Ośrodk
Posted: 26/October/2023
We are happy to announce the next presentations of the Visegrad Scholarship at OSA. Join the event in the Archivum, or online! The presentations will be held at 11:00 on Wednesday, November 15, 2023, in the Meeting Room of the Blinken OSA Archivum, and online. 
 
Contested Memories: Antifascism, Jews and the Holocaust
Posted: 12/October/2023
This roundtable discussion explores the various ways the Holocaust was represented in Cold War Central Europe, considering major examples of official memory politics, exhibition histories, fine arts, and literature in the 1960s. It considers the agency of state actors, the Jewish community, as well as individuals, especially artists and writers, paying special attention to the eminent role played by the antifascist historical narrative. OSA Archivum’s current exhibition offers a starting point for the discussion. Titled “Commissioned Memory. Hungarian Exhibitions in Auschwitz, 1960/1965,” it introduces a monumental fine arts collection commissioned for the 1965 Hungarian exhibition in Auschwitz, as well as an exceptional work from 1960 (‘Vampire Hitler,’ based on Simon Wiesenthal’s 1946 drawing), created for the same venue.
 
(Photo: Lajos Erdélyi)
Posted: 12/October/2023
Lajos Erdélyi’s unique legacy has been donated to the Blinken OSA Archivum. Its backbone is a collection of some 20,000 photographs documenting everyday life and art in Transylvania between 1950 and 1990. The photographic negatives, sound recordings, and manuscripts found their way to the Archivum thanks to the family and the intermediaries who worked to preserve the legacy.
 
The book cover of In Visible Presence Soviet Afterlives in Family Photos
Posted: 04/October/2023
The Book published by The MIT Press is an absorbing exploration of Soviet-era family photographs that demonstrates the singular power of the photographic image to command attention, resist closure, and complicate the meaning of the past.
 
(Photo: Peter Lorenz)
Posted: 20/September/2023
The Blinken OSA Archivum offers undergraduate and postgraduate academic courses and specializations to Central European University (CEU) students, organized in cooperation with the departments of Legal Studies and History, and for CEU’s annual Summer University (SUN). The Archivum's teaching staff, commuting between Budapest and Vienna, have been fully directing or co-teaching mandatory historiography courses or seminars on the uses of archives, history writing, and legal issues. Underpinned by the Archivum’s holdings, the lectures address the historian’s craft, truth, and objectivity, and study human rights issues and related cinematic and evidentiary practices.