The Desk, the Diary, and the Dispersed Letter Four Days in Ignaz Goldziher’s Budapest, 7–10 September 2026

This piece recounts a four-day research trip (7–10 September 2026) to Budapest and its surroundings in pursuit of the archival legacy of the Islamicist Ignaz Goldziher (1850–1921). Although the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (LHAS) has cataloged, digitized, and made freely accessible its 13,430 letters addressed to Goldziher, consulting materials in situ restores relations of scale, materiality, provenance, and custodial history that no digital surrogate can convey. Five stations are described: the LHAS Oriental Collection, Goldziher's former home on Holló utca 4, the Hungarian Jewish Museum and Archives (MILEV, holding his writing desk), the Avicenna Institute at Piliscsaba (holding his 660-page autograph Tagebuch), and the Jewish Theological Seminary–University of Jewish Studies with its looted and partly restituted library. A central theme is an initiative, discussed with LHAS staff, to digitally reunite Goldziher's dispersed correspondence—especially his scattered, largely uninventoried outgoing letters—so his scholarly life can be read as dialogue rather than monologue. Interwoven with commemorative sites such as the Shoes on the Danube memorial, the account insists that the history of the discipline and the catastrophes of the twentieth century cannot be told apart, making the reassembly of these dispersed archives a form of restitution.