Authors

Discussion

This paper traces the creation of a secret archive during communism and its fate in the post-communist decades. Based on secret police reports and contemporary oral testimony, I explore the means, motivations and conflicts that shaped the materialization and dissolution of the archive. In the 1960s, two former Greek Catholic monks of the Hungarian Basilian order that had been forcibly shut down by the party state in 1950 began to work in tandem to reconstitute their order underground and to preserve its legacy and archival records. They engaged in a number of activities including secretly preparing selected seminary students for monastic life, establishing places of refuge where they could meet in safety, and preserving the memory of the Basilian order through the collection of documents pertaining to their history. In 1973, closely observed by the secret police, one of the two monks, Bertalan Dudás, who was the brother of Miklós Dudás, Greek Catholic Bishop of Hajdúdorog (1939-1972), initiated a plan to establish a memorial museum to his recently deceased brother. Bertalan Dudás’ dual goal of memorializing his brother and preserving the memory of the Basilian order met opposition from both the party state and the new hierarchy of the Greek Catholic Church. Access to secret police reports sheds light on the legacy of collaboration, cooperation and resistance that, I argue, have determined the material fate of the archive in the post-communist context and how the communist past is memorialized by the Greek Catholic Church.