Teleki-Bolyai Library in Târgu Mureș

The Teleki-Bolyai Library stands in the centre of Târgu Mureș, at 17 Bolyai Street, in an L-shaped town palace. The western part of the building was put up in the mid-1770s by Kata Wesselényi, widow of Zsigmond Rhédey, and was inherited by her niece Zsuzsanna Bethlen, wife of Count Sámuel Teleki. From 1799, Sámuel Teleki, then in Vienna as Court Chancellor of Transylvania, extended the building with a library wing designed by the Viennese architect Ernest Koch, with changes made by the local builder Antal Türk. Work was begun by Ignác Schlaff and completed in 1802 by János Kövecsi, and the shelving and joinery were made by the master carpenter Ádám Molnár. It housed the first public library of the Grand Principality of Transylvania. After church schools were nationalised in 1948, the library of the Reformed College was moved into the same building in 1955, and in 1962 the two collections were merged under the name Teleki-Bolyai. The great hall, which also serves as the book store, has three aisles and a gallery in the tradition of Baroque libraries, and holds Sámuel Teleki's collection of nearly 40,000 volumes, including the volumes of Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie. The building also houses the Bolyai Museum, opened on 7 November 1937, which displays personal belongings of the mathematicians Farkas and János Bolyai, some of them brought from Buia in 1887. The institution works both as a museum and as a library with a reading room for researchers. The building is a listed historic monument (LMI code MS-II-m-A-15486). The library is open to the public as a museum and as a research library.