Did you know this about your Hungarian university?
Higher education in Hungary has a history of several hundred years. We have collected for you the oldest universities in our country, which are still operating in some form or another. Maybe you are studying there? Share your thoughts and experiences!
These were the first universities in our country
The medieval university of Pécs, which was the very first university in Hungary, was founded in Pécs by King Lajos I the Great in 1367, but it only operated for a few decades. It is interesting that the official legal predecessor of today's University of Pécs was not this, but the Royal Elizabeth of Hungary University of Bratislava, founded in 1912.
Óbuda University became the second Hungarian university and the first such institution in the capital. At the time of its foundation (1395), the University of Pécs was no longer functioning. However, today's Óbuda University is not the legal successor of the medieval school founded by Sigismund of Luxemburg, but it wanted to follow its traditions with its name.
It's good if you know: After the end of King Sigismund's institution, there was no university at all in the area of today's Budapest for hundreds of years. King Matthias also experimented with founding a university only in Bratislava.
Our oldest continuously operating university
Several Hungarian universities do not seem that old at first, but their legal predecessors were founded in the Middle Ages. In terms of legal continuity, the Debrecen Reformatory College is the oldest continuously operating higher education institution in Hungary. The roots of the today's University of Debrecen go back to the College founded in 1538. When the Royal Hungarian University of Debrecen was founded in the College building in 1912, the Reformed Faculty of Religious Studies was part of it from then on. That is why the College can be considered the legal predecessor of the university.
The longest continuously operating Hungarian university
The longest continuously operating university in Hungary is Eötvös Loránd University. ELTE's legal predecessor was founded by the Jesuit Pázmány Péter Esztergom Archbishop in 1635 in Nagyszombat. You can find the settlement in the Highlands, called Trnava, in today's Slovakia. However, the University of Nagyszombati is actually not only the legal predecessor of ELTE but also of Pázmány Péter Catholic University and Semmelweis University.
In the beginning, the University of Nagyszombati had only one faculty: the humanities and theology working together. Teaching was of course in Latin - as in essentially all European universities of the time. The faculty of law was established in 1667, and the faculty of medicine in 1769. It was then that it became a university in the classical sense.
After the dissolution of the Jesuit order, in 1777, the university moved to Buda by decree of Mária Theresia. The name of the institution changed to Royal Hungarian University from 1769 to 1784. II. József moved the university to Pest in 1784 so that the country's main offices could be located in Buda. The institution was named the Royal University of Pest.
The current Faculty of Law's building on Egyetem tér was originally built in 1900 as the new, central palace of Budapest University.
The language of education was Latin until 1844: it was then that the state’s use of the Hungarian language was introduced. Then its name was changed again in 1873 to the University of Budapest. It seems strange today that women could only enroll here for the first time in 1895.
After another renaming, between 1921 and 1950, the institution was called the Hungarian Royal Pázmány Péter University. Only then did it get the name it still knows today, Eötvös Loránd University.
How were Pázmány and Semmelweis University founded?
In 1950, the Faculty of Religious Studies of ELTE was annexed by order of the state and became an independent academy. After that, it continued to operate under the name of the Roman Catholic Academy of Religious Studies, whose name was officially changed to the Pázmány Péter University of Religious Studies in 1990.
At the beginning of 1951, for reasons of state administration, the Faculty of Medicine of ELTE became an independent university ( the Semmelweis University ) which is still known today.