The estate of the last Hungarian crown prince is being digitised

The Otto von Habsburg Foundation has set itself the primary goal of preserving the intellectual and material heritage of its namesake in a worthy manner, organising it into a unified collection, processing it and making it researchable.

In this work, alongside conservation, ensuring online accessibility is also a particularly important objective of the Foundation, which is why it asked Tripont’s specialists to digitise the various archival photographs and negatives in the photograph collection in the best quality possible.

On the life of Otto von Habsburg

In 1921 the father of the last Hungarian crown prince, Otto von Habsburg – Charles IV, the last King of Hungary, crowned in 1916 (Emperor Charles I of Austria) – was deprived of his throne and his family was exiled to the island of Madeira in the Atlantic Ocean. Otto spent part of his life in exile, finally settling in Pöcking in Upper Bavaria; he married Princess Regina of Saxe-Meiningen, and they had seven children, five daughters and two sons. He was only able to return to his native country, Austria, in 1966. He visited Hungary again in the late 1980s, and in August 1989 he was patron of the famous Pan-European Picnic at Sopronpuszta. As a Member of the European Parliament he was the first to speak there in Hungarian, urged Hungary’s early accession to the European Union and on numerous occasions stood up for the interests of the Hungarian minorities beyond the borders.

© Otto von Habsburg Foundation – Tripont Foto Video Kft.

The digitisation project

Thanks to his long and eventful life of almost a hundred years, Otto von Habsburg’s photographic estate spans a very rich and varied range of techniques. The collection contains almost everything, from super-sensitive glass plate negatives through roll films and slides to an album compiled from digitally taken images, so it was of the utmost importance that the collection be digitised with a system that produces the best quality with gentle material handling and without any damage. Our specialists processed the greater part of the digitised material on site at the Foundation.

© Otto von Habsburg Foundation – Tripont Foto Video Kft.

In the future the Foundation will make most of the finished digital material available to the online public as well, so that anyone will be able to view images that until now were not visible to the general public at all. On 23 January 2023, in connection with the Day of Hungarian Culture, the Foundation will present its activities and the finished online research interface.

You can register at the following link: www.hoal.hu/evkezdet2023