On July 23, 2025, Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó announced that the New York District Attorney's Office had returned a priceless publication written in 1675 to Hungary, which had previously been stolen from Budapest.
The publication in question is Nervus Opticus sive Tractatus theoricus by Jesuit monk Zacharias Traber (1611–1679), which appeared at an auction at an antique bookshop in New York in March 2022. A handwritten note on the title page indicates that it once belonged to the library of the Jesuit college in Nagyszombat, the predecessor of the University Library. The volume, published in Vienna in 1675, is divided into three books: optics (the science of light), catoptrics (the science of reflected light, i.e., reflection), and dioptrics (the science of refraction). The title page of this richly illustrated publication was created by copperplate engraver Tobias Sadeler (c. 1641–1679), and it was probably his workshop that produced the plates containing the illustrations. In addition to the fundamentals of optics, Traber also analyzes the practical tasks involved in producing various catoptric combinations based on his personal design experience. The chapters describing the archbishop's garden in Bratislava are an important historical source. The volume was published with two different dedications: one part contained a dedication to Karl von Liechtenstein-Kastelkorn, Bishop of Olomouc (1664-1695), while the other part contained a dedication praising György Szelepcsényi, Archbishop of Esztergom. Only three copies dedicated to Archbishop Szelepcsényi are preserved today in Hungarian public collections.
As the legal successor to the library of the Jesuit college in Nagyszombat, the ELTE University Library and Archives launched an extensive investigation to determine whether the volume that appeared in New York was identical to the copy missing from our collection. With the help of the antiquarian bookshop that announced the auction, it was proven that the elements proving that the volume once belonged to a public collection had clearly been removed: a small stamp was found on the title page, and the flyleaf and endpaper (where other ownership stamps would have been) had been replaced. Multispectral imaging revealed that the volume had once borne the ownership stamp of the former Collegium of Baron József Eötvös. After lengthy research, it was finally possible to reconstruct the volume's adventurous journey. According to the University Library's manuscript catalogues, it still had seven copies of the volume in 1690. In 1777, when the library moved from Nagyszombat to Buda, it only had two copies left. During the move, approximately three thousand volumes that were no longer necessary for university education were left behind in Nagyszombat, and most of these were distributed among various church institutions and individuals. This is how one copy of the volume ended up at the Catholic High School in Pozsony, and from there to the library of the Eötvös József Collegium. It disappeared from the Collegium in the 1940s, and now, some eight decades later, thanks to the cooperation of the ELTE University Library and Archives, it can be returned to its rightful owner.
Details of the lengthy and exciting investigation can be found in Dr. Kulcsár Szabó Ernőné Gombos Annamária's article entitled Everything you wanted to know about the protection of public collections but were afraid to ask.