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Tens of thousands of centuries-old books are being pulled from the shelves of a medieval abbey in Hungary in an effort to save them from a beetle infestation that could wipe out centuries of history. The 1,000-year-old Pannonhalma Archabbey is a sprawling Benedictine monastery that is one of Hungary’s oldest centers of learning and a UNESCO World Heritage site.
Restoration workers are removing about 100,000 handbound books from their shelves and carefully placing them in crates, the start of a disinfection process that aims to kill the tiny beetles burrowed into them.
The drugstore beetle, also known as the bread beetle, is often found among dried foodstuffs like grains, flour and spices. But they are also attracted to the gelatin- and starch-based adhesives found in books. They have been found in a section of the library housing around a quarter of the abbey’s 400,000 volumes.
“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, holes could be seen in the paper where the beetles had chewed through.
The abbey at Pannonhalma was founded in 996, four years before the establishment of the Kingdom of Hungary. Sitting upon a tall hill in northwestern Hungary, the abbey houses the country’s oldest collection of books, as well as many of its earliest and most important written records.
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 catalog in Hungary,” she said.
This article was provided by The Associated Press.