One of the most valuable volumes in our library is the richly illustrated, written to parchment Dante Alighieri’s Divina Comoedia (Divine Comedy), that was copied in Venice in the late 1330s and early 1340s. The codex was transported from the Royal Palace of Buda to Turkey, where it spent more than three hundred years in the damp treasury of the Topkapi serai. It returned to Hungary in 1877, according to the decision of the Turkish sultan. Due to its severely damaged condition, the manuscript was restored under the „Corvina program” on the base of a multi-year plan with the development of new procedures.
The work was reseen by the general public at our highly successful Cultural Heritage Days event on the occasion of the 700th anniversary of Dante’s death, with the digital version available in the EDIT repository.
Through the Foundation for the University Library, the codex was adopted by its restorers, Ildikó Beöthyné Kozocsa and Györgyi Szlabey. Thank you for their support!