Dénes Dienes: History of the Reformed Church Collég in Sárospatak (Sárospatak, 2013)
SPIRIT AND MOOD - Together, yet apart - independence for the secondary school
150 SECONDARY SCHOOL AND COLLEGE the date in question here, the College had neither registered nor discarded any documents for forty years. This also meant that the difficult and responsible task of sorting also fell to him. In the end, he had handled more than just eighty-five thousand pages, exponentially more. The work which he did was desperately needed. Neglecting the archives for decades put the basic operation of the institution at risk. Sometimes it took weeks for leaders of the school to find key legal documents. Apart from functional and economic reasons, by the end of the 19th century - with ever- increasing activity in historical research - even the demand for studying the past had also increased. Thus Zsoldos’ selfless service immediately opened up intellectual opportunities for the College. His responsibilities included the unification of the previously separately managed archives of the College and the church district. The task was most fitting but posed a number of practical difficulties: the church documents were submitted in a haphazard manner and by the time he finished the preparation of reference materials, a newer bulk shipment arrived, thus forcing him to re-start the entire process. In the end, he succeeded in creating one integrated system for both the church district and the College archives which was professional and easy to use. He not only organized the documents but wrote a short two- or three-line descriptive summary of each and then organized these index cards in three different ways. The Zsoldos- material is still researchable even today by chronological order, by name or by location. Very rarely can any tangible error in those index cards be found even today. His was quite a remarkable performance especially since he worked for twenty years without an assistant or helper - and still he was able to triumph over centuries old documents, often of multiple sheets in length and in a wide variety of languages. Zsoldos continued his work with the material of the archives until 1912. He was officially appointed as the principal archivist of both the College and the church district in 1907. His teaching career ended when he retired in 1910 but he continued to work with the archival material. His health had deteriorated to a serious degree by the final days of his life and he was not always in control of his powers of reasoning and often gazed into nothingness. He died in June 1919. SPIRIT AND MOOD TOGETHER, YET APART - INDEPENDENCE FOR THE SECONDARY SCHOOL The new era began with a series of long debates to decide on the secondary school’s organizational affiliation. It may be recalled that, in earlier centuries, management of the secondary school was combined with that of the Academy’s, although it always had a subordinate position in this unity. This is reflected in the lengths of time the two educational units were organized with adult teachers not even teaching at the secondary level until the end of the 18th century. The situation had changed by the middle of the 19th century. The different functions of each individual school level had become more consolidated and the separation seemed inevitable, all of which hastened the process to clarify the inner
