PANNONHALMA, Hungary (AP) — Tens of thousands of centuries-old books are being pulled from the shelves of a medieval abbey in Hungary in an effort to save them from a beetle infestation that could wipe out centuries of history.
The 1,000-year-old Pannonhalma Archabbey is a sprawling Benedictine monastery that is one of Hungary’s oldest centers of learning and a UNESCO World Heritage site.
Restoration workers are removing about 100,000 handbound books from their shelves and carefully placing them in crates, the start of a disinfection process that aims to kill the tiny beetles burrowed into them.
The procedure here, it seems, is to store them in an inert environment, namely nitrogen, so a very similar process.