Dénes Dienes: History of the Reformed Church Collég in Sárospatak (Sárospatak, 2013)
SPIRIT AND MOOD - Connections through Peregrination
financial base to underwrite a period of peregrination for every professor and teacher on staff at the College of Patak, to be taken prior to their launching into a career of educating the youth. With the rise of the culture of the printed word coupled with the gradual easing of censorship, international scientific, political, and literary articles and publications could find their way much faster to the banks of the Bodrog River than ever before. Even if this did not counterbalance the fraying of peregrination connections, it perhaps did provide a certain compensation to students and professors of the Reform Era. The Czech-Moravian Mission In the history dealing with the foreign relations of the College in Patak, the Czech-Moravi- an Mission comprises an interesting chapter. By the terms of the Edict of Tolerance issued by Joseph II, Czech and Moravian Protestants were liberated and could henceforth practice their religion freely. The Czech-Moravian brethren, approximately seventy thousand in number, were often persecuted or threatened with imprisonment and suffered from the severe pressure generated by “counter-Reformation” practices. At the outset, the Hungarian Reformed Church provided them with pastors and then their own members were able to enroll as students in Hungary to acquire the necessary educational training. Thus the Czech-Moravian Mission played a significant role in the life of the College in Patak for decades and expanded into a bilateral relationship. Despite initial organizational difficulties and the school’s reluctance to let students with Tot (Slovak) language skills to serve in this mission field, in November 1782, eleven young gentlemen nonetheles set off from Patak for this purpose. Up until 1787, thirty-eight more newly ordained ministers left Hungary for the same purpose, thus becoming part of a sporadic ripple of emigration which continued until 1821, meaning that until this date, it was predominantly Hungarian pastors who served in the Czech and Moravian congregations. Although until approximately the 1830s, a relatively large number of Hungarian pastors went to serve in the congregations of the Czech Republic, the long-term solution was seen to be the educating of Czech students in Sárospatak and, to a lesser extent, in Debrecen. The College’s records provide a rough estimate of the number of students who studied in Patak. During the initial decades of the College, Czech and Moravian students visited Patak relatively regularly but their number fluctuated from year to year and never attained any substantial size. By the mid-1830s, Czechs and Moravians stopped coming to Patak to enroll for study as a group and, from then on, only a few students appeared sporadically. Generally, they completed some of their senior year here at the College on the west bank of the Bodrog River and finished their primary and secondary education closer to their home community. It should be noted that not all students who came from the Czech Republic were Czech or Moravian by birth. Some were the sons of Hungarian pastors who had moved there earlier and returned to spend longer than average periods (sometimes even six to eight years) in Patak. The children of these pastors were the recipients of special treatment as provided by the College. The church district tried to compensate to some extent the students who came from an environment characterized by harsh living conditions or who lived in extreme poverty, as did many of the families of the pastors serving in the context of this mission. FROM THE ENLIGHTEMENT TO THE END OF THE WAR OF INDEPENDENCE 122
