Delegates of the Protestant Estates of the Upper Mountains decided to establish the Prešov Evangelical College as a counterbalance to the Jesuit University in Trnava at a meeting in Košice on 18 November 1665. Not only the Upper Highland Protestant magnates, landowners and the free royal town contributed financially to the construction, but also the King of Sweden, the Estates of Transylvania and some German princes. From the very beginning, several distinguished professors from all over Hungary and abroad taught there. Thanks to his personality and modern teaching methods, the college reached such a level that the Estates planned to turn it into an evangelical university. The year 1815 was also significant in its history, when it began to teach law. In the first half of the 19th century it grew into one of the most important higher education institutions in the whole of Hungary. Among its students we can find many important personalities such as the leader of the anti-Habsburg resistance Imrich Tököli, the famous English Baroque painter Jakub Bogdani, politicians and cultural figures such as Michal Miloslav Hodža, J. Záborský, P. O. Hviezdoslav, L. Kossuth, J. Jesenský, the general of the 1848/1849 revolution Aristid Dessewffy, politician and archaeologist F. Pulský and others. The most beautiful room among the interiors is the aula - Dvorana, where the historical collections of the collegiate library are located. It contains more than 40 000 volumes of books. In 1908, a monument to the victims of the Caraffa Bloody Trial of 1687 was erected on the north-west corner, along with a memorial plaque with the names of those executed. On 2 July 1995, during a visit to Prešov, Pope John Paul II paid homage to the memory of the Prešov martyrs at this monument. After the renovation of the interior of the college, the building began to serve the Evangelical Church's episcopal office in the spring of 1998.
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