An Archive Beyond the Texts: The Lund University Ecclesiastical History Archive

After the October Revolution of 1917, St .Catherine's Swedish Church and its clergy in St .Petersburg suffered immensely .This was the first Protestant congregation in Russia to experience having its property confiscated and nationalised by the new authorities .In 1934, the building was desacralised into a Soviet sports school .The vessels were handed over to the Soviet authorities, whereas the archives were transported to the Swedish consulate and, in 1938, illegally sent to Stockholm, later to be deposited in the Swedish National Archive (Sw .Riksarkivet) .This removal of the archives represents a fascinating historical act that from a cultural perspective may be com pared with the translation of holy images, vessels, etcetera .The location and preservation of the archives is a question that became important with regard to the renewed memory of the congregation after 2005, when the church was returned to the re-established congregation .These circumstances bring to the fore the quite obvious but important words of Aleida Assmann, that "the archives is the basis of what can be said in the future about the present when it will have become the past" . 1 Having said that, I have in other contexts stated that an archive is always something beyond the texts .However, below I show that the contents of textual archives could also be a highly concrete bearer of material memory .