The Radziwiłł Collection

The National Library’s Radziwiłł Collection, listed in UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register in 2009, consists of a part of the library collected by the Polish-Lithuanian Radziwiłł princely family in the Nesvizh Castle in the 16 th century. The Radziwiłł family was politically influential and ruled large fortunes from the 15 th century onwards in the area of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth of the time.

In November 1827, just a month after the Great Fire of Turku, the Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences made the decision to donate a significant portion of the collections in its possession to replace the Imperial Academy of Turku’s library collection, which was destroyed in the fire. Some of the donations came from former private libraries that had come to the Academy’s possession, and one of them was the Radziwiłł family library. The main part of the library had been transferred to Saint Petersburg as spoils of war in 1772 after Russian troops had captured Nesvizh during the First Partition of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

Nearly 1,400 works dealing mainly with Western European theology and law were donated to Helsinki. The collection thus enables a long term review of the history of European theology and law. The Radziwiłł Library has been part of the Finnish cultural heritage for almost 200 years. The significance of the collection for Finland cannot be overemphasised: the collection has promoted research in these fields of study as well as in book history in recent decades.