Economy 30 June 2020, 4:12pm

CEU moves 35,000 books to Vienna from Budapest

Portfolio

Central European University (CEU), founded by Hungarian-born financier and philanthropist George Soros, is relocating 35,000 books and many staff from Budapest to Vienna, according to a footnote on the CEU website’s library page spotted by news portal 444.hu.

After CEU was successfully driven out of Hungary by laws adopted by the government led by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, it opened a new campus in Vienna in November 2019.

Please excuse our circumstances over the summer, we are moving 35,000 books to Vienna as CEU transitions most of its educational activities to Vienna. Many staff are relocating too

, CEU says on its library services page.

The same website shows that the library holds

190,533 books and
177,410 e-books
with an addition of about 4,000 books per year.

CEU’s management has not yet announced the relocation officially. Hungary’s Lex CEU has forbidden Central European University (CEU) to accept new students after 1 January, 2019, and it forced CEU launch all U.S.-accredited degree programmes in Vienna in September 2019. The CEU library was among the few services that stayed in Budapest after the university’s exile.