Since its establishment in 1995, the Open Society Archives (renamed the Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives in 2015), one of the biggest units of the Central European University (CEU), has become a renowned international institution for the study of Communism, the Cold War, and Human Rights, also playing an important role in the cultural and professional scene of Budapest. In 2017, the need for a comprehensive timeline to demonstrate more than two decades of archival and public activities, as well as our productive relationship with CEU, arose against the backdrop of governmental attacks aimed at the university. These attacks led to CEU‘s forced relocation to Vienna, Austria, where teaching has started in 2020, posing fundamental professional and logistic challenges to the Archives operating in Budapest ever since. Now the timeline is updated with the developments since the 2017 announcement of Lex CEU, revealing that despite the difficulties, Blinken OSA has remained an independent yet organic part of the university.
Explore Blinken OSA‘s history through selected milestones in archival processing and development, exhibitions and conferences, academic and public education programs on osaisceu.osaarchivum.org!