Avar Anton: Beregi címereslevelek a Magyar Nemzeti Levéltárban - A Szabolcs-Szatmár-Bereg Megyei Levéltár Kiadványai II. Közlemények 55. (Nyíregyháza, 2020)
Patents of arms from Bereg (resume)
beregi_cimereslevelek_final_HOME_3.indd 29 2020. 11. 18. 7:06:06 Anton Avar Patents of arms from Bereg county (resume) The volume presents the patents of arms connected to the former Hungarian Bereg county, the territory of which now belongs mainly to Ukraine. The title may be interpreted in one of two ways: on the one hand, it can mean the patents once published (proclaimed) in Bereg county, on the other, the collection of the patents of arms of the former county archives. Among the 3158 patents of arms held in the National Archives of Hungary (NAH), nearly all of which are published in a comprehensive online database,82 there are only twentyfive patents published in Bereg county. In this volume the Latin texts of the said 25 charters are published alongside their abstracts and the blazons, illustrated by the images of both the patents themselves and the heraldic miniatures. Formerly, the archives of Bereg county held a significant number of patents of arms. Catalogues of the collection were first published in 1886 by Tivadar Lehoczky, monographist of Bereg county, then in 1900–1901 by Tamás Szent-Imrey, archivist of Bereg county, and finally in 1909 by Dezső Rexa, then archivist of Árva county. The most comprehensive and detailed description was made between 1912–1915 by Sándor Horváth, vice-archivist of state, however it was never published. The bulk of the former Bereg county archives is now kept at the Ukrainian State Archives of the Zakarpattia Region (DAZO), but today there are no original grants of arms besides the one of Pál Hodermárszky from 1712 and of Bereg county itself from 1836. Appendix I contains the complete reconstructed catalogue of the former collection of original patents of arms of Bereg county. The collection itself is now held in the Central Archives of the 82 http://adatbazisokonline.hu/adatbazis/cimereslevel-adatbazis (31.10.2020) NAH. The reasons for this can be traced back to a scandal in Prague in 1902, when Alois Miller, self-proclaimed Knight of Mildenberg, was sentenced to two years in prison for forging archival documents with the purpose of attesting the nobility of his clients. As a consequence, in 1906 the Minister of the Interior of Hungary, Count Gyula Andrássy Jr. issued a general order, requesting the county archives to send their patents of arms to the Central Archives in Budapest for a revision. The official in charge of the project was vice-archivist Sándor Horváth (1872–1924), an expert on forged patents of arms. Between 1906 and 1919 he contacted 37 of the existing 64 counties, although in the end only 23 of them have actually sent their patents of arms to the capital. The synoptic table of the project is shown in Appendix II. While the archives of Bereg county had also been contacted in 1906 along with the others, their 67 patents of arms have only been sent to Budapest in 1908 (64 of these were original and 3 were copies). Upon Horváth’s repeated request in 1912 the archives of Bereg county have sent 141 copies of patents of arms as well. Horváth has created detailed descriptions of every single piece of the collection, which were archived in the dossier of the project. In 1920 he was suspended from his office due to discipline violations, and in 1924 the patents of arms from Bereg county (both the originals and the copies) were incorporated in the holdings of the Central Archives in Budapest under No. 83. of the collection titled Ladula RRR. Today only 65 of the 67 charters can be found at the Central Archives of the NAH in the funds R 64 and R 319. The patent of arms of István Bogdányi otherwise Bélteky from 1668 and the grant of land to the Gecsei family from 1464 had already gone missing by 1924. The 141 copies submitted in 1912 have likely been returned to Beregszász 29
