6 Hidden Libraries Around the World

Marie Antoinette’s Library, Versailles

The Palace of Versailles, once the home of French monarchs Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette (among others), has many lavish spaces full of large-scale paintings, ostentatious decor, and gilded finishes. It’s also home to multiple libraries, some more obvious than others. Marie Antoinette had one built just for her, but it wasn’t in her grand, ceremonial apartment — it was in the small back rooms reserved for her and her ladies-in-waiting.

Despite a reputation for frivolity, Marie Antoinette was a prolific collector of books, including several volumes that her own husband had banned. Her collection exceeded 10,000 books, and was so large that, despite having another library in her second residence, the Petit Trianon, she eventually had to expand this library into an adjoining room just a couple of years after the original library was finished.

Vatican Apostolic Archives

Nothing screams “secret library” like an underground vault called “the Bunker” — although, since vetted researchers have been able to access it since 1881, it’s not that secret. The Catholic Church’s archives in Vatican City contain 1,200 years of documents, including correspondence on Henry VIII’s request to divorce Catherine Aragon in the 1530s and records of Galileo’s 1633 trial for heresy. The archives also contain primary source material for events all over the world, including letters from both Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis imploring the pope to take a side in the American Civil War. The 2009 film Angels & Demons (the sequel to The Da Vinci Code) added some extra mystique to the archives, thanks to a scene featuring two characters trapped inside the bunker.

The library’s official Latin name, Archivium Secretum, is frequently translated to “secret archives,” although the Vatican maintains that Secretum was intended to mean something more like “private.” In 2019, Pope Francis renamed the library the Vatican Apostolic Archives to make it seem less shadowy.

La Librarie, Catacombs, Paris

The Paris Catacombs date back to the late 18th century, when surface cemeteries in Paris grew so overcrowded, they started impacting water quality. A thousand years’ worth of remains were transferred to an underground quarry, then arranged into galleries by quarry workers. This macabre labyrinth now contains around 186 miles of tunnels, and although only a tiny fraction are open to the public, Parisians frequently slip down into the depths for some urban exploration and, occasionally, to create some art projects.

You’ve probably seen one of those Little Free Libraries — usually a small cabinet of some sort where neighbors can take books to read and leave books they’re ready to part with. Well, one corner of the Paris Catacombs is a far less accessible version of that. La Librairie is a small room, labeled with a helpful sign, where explorers take and leave books. Unfortunately, the dank environment underground isn’t the best for archival purposes, so the books can get a little moldy.

Metropolitan Ervin Szabó Library, Budapest

This one is a library hidden inside another library. When you first walk into the Ervin Szabó Library in Budapest, Hungary, it looks like a somewhat normal library, painted in beige with newer desks and bookshelves. But if you make your way through the stacks, you’ll suddenly find yourself in a palace — literally. When it was built in the 1880s, the building was Wenckheim Palace, home to Count Frigyes and Countess Krisztina Wenckheim. It became city property in 1926, and a city library in 1931, but it took damage in both World Wars and, later, during Soviet retaliation against protesters. It was restored most recently in 1998, but by then the library’s collection had outgrown it, so the city built another, far less luxurious library around it.

Located on the fourth floor, the count’s former smoking room, the Grand Ballroom, and the Silver Salon serve as work and reading rooms, created in an opulent neo-Baroque style, complete with ornately carved ceilings, massive chandeliers, gold finishes, and winding spiral staircases.

Syria’s Secret Library

Darayya, a town 5 miles outside Damascus, was known for opposing the government of Bashar al-Assad, and was under constant bombardment from 2012 to 2016, when the town was evacuated and decimated. In 2013, when the town’s population had already fallen from 80,000 to just 8,000, a group of around 40 young volunteers started salvaging books from the rubble. They opened an underground library in the basement of a house that had otherwise been destroyed.

Aboveground, the town’s residents faced food, power, and water shortages. But in the library, people could check out books, find space to read, or even participate in a book club. Volunteers taught classes on English, math, and history. They had to advertise by word of mouth alone; they couldn’t risk the Syrian army learning of the library and making it a target. Unfortunately, after the town was evacuated, the library was torn apart.

Dunhuang Library Cave

The Mogao Grottoes, located in the city of Dunhuang in northwest China, are a collection of nearly 500 cliffside caves, each excavated by hand and decorated in stunning Buddhist art — including more than 2,000 painted sculptures and nearly 500,000 square feet of murals. One cave even holds a 1,300-year-old statue of Buddha that’s more than 100 feet tall. Created between the fourth and 14th centuries, these caves were once along a busy Silk Road hub, and represent hundreds of years of cultural exchange.

By 1900, the caves had fallen into disrepair, and a Tibetan monk appointed himself their caretaker. One day, he knocked down a wall and made a startling discovery: a cavern packed with documents, some stacked nearly 10 feet high.

This cave library had been sealed off for around a millennium, and contained both documents of everyday life on the Silk Road and rare religious texts. European academics and explorers picked apart much of the library over the next decade, and by the time the Chinese government stepped in, only around a fifth of the collection was left. Yet in the 21st century, there’s been more of an effort to reconcile the massive collection; through the International Dunhuang Project, archivists all over the world are digitizing the documents and putting them into a centralized database.