Tens of thousands of centuries-old books are being urgently removed from a medieval abbey in Hungary in a desperate bid to save them from a devastating beetle infestation.
The 1,000-year-old Pannonhalma Archabbey, a sprawling Benedictine monastery and a UNESCO World Heritage site, is one of Hungary’s most ancient centres of learning.
Restoration workers are meticulously pulling approximately 100,000 handbound volumes from the abbey’s shelves and are carefully placing them into crates as part of a disinfection process.
This aims to eradicate the tiny drugstore beetles, also known as bread beetles, which have burrowed into the historic texts.
The insects, commonly found among dried foodstuffs, are drawn to the gelatin and starch-based adhesives used in bookbinding.
The infestation has been discovered in a section of the library containing around a quarter of the abbey’s 400,000 volumes, threatening to wipe out centuries of accumulated knowledge.
“This is an advanced insect infestation which has been detected in several parts of the library, so the entire collection is classified as infected and must be treated all at the same time,” said Zsófia Edit Hajdu, the chief restorer on the project.
“We’ve never encountered such a degree of infection before.”
The beetle invasion was first detected during a routine library cleaning. Employees noticed unusual layers of dust on the shelves and then saw that holes had been burrowed into some of the book spines.
Upon opening the volumes, burrow holes could be seen in the paper where the beetles chewed through.
The abbey at Pannonhalma was founded in 996, four years before the establishment of the Hungarian Kingdom. Sitting upon a tall hill in northwestern Hungary, it houses the country’s oldest collection of books, as well as many of its earliest and most important written records.
For more than 1,000 years, the abbey has been among the most prominent religious and cultural sites in Hungary and all of Central Europe, surviving centuries of wars and foreign incursions such as the Ottoman invasion and occupation of Hungary in the 16th century.
Ilona Ásványi, director of the Pannonhalma Archabbey library, said she is “humbled” by the historical and cultural treasures the collection holds whenever she enters.
“It is dizzying to think that there was a library here a thousand years ago, and that we are the keepers of the first book catalogue in Hungary,” she said.
