Dénes Dienes: History of the Reformed Church Collég in Sárospatak (Sárospatak, 2013)
THE STRUGGLE AGAINST MARGINALIZATION- BEFORE AND AFTER WORLD WAR II. - “Patak became my destiny” - Kálmán Újszászy
196 lated from his village seminar program, he added to the institution a database and thus established the Scholarly Collections in Sárospatak, including within it many unique, historical and literary treasures. But the veritable significance of the library, the database, the museum and the collections goes far beyond this: thanks to Újszászy and his staff, the church institution operated as a pilot light and nurtured the hope of better times to come by keeping local traditions and faith in a rebirth alive. It must have surely been a very special gift for him - although already retired - to have lived to see these hopes come true. Through his initiatives for village seminars and the ‘people’s college’, he became well-known throughout the country. Mentioned earlier was that his scholarly work was closely connected to village research, thus he became an ethnographer, although, on the basis of his professional beliefs and according to the department to which he was assigned at the College of Sárospatak, he was considered to be a philosopher. Nonetheless, as a teacher and later as the director of the Collections, he mostly worked in institutions of theological affiliation. His publications were not numerous, yet they were diverse. In researching his name, it is mostly works on village seminars and to a lesser extent the writings on the ‘people’s college’ and Researching and serving villages The Reformed Church College in Sárospatak considered its diverse social responsibilities traditionally important. Between the two wars, the people of the school increasingly directed this aspect of the College towards the poorest layers of society of the immediate and surrounding region. The following formulation is deliberate: the village seminars which started in the school year of1931-1932 were not initiated by the leaders of the school or of the church for it truly was a grass-roots movement initiated by the students. Influenced by two young teachers (Kálmán Újszászy and Zoltán Szabó) students started to take closer note of the conditions and hardships of the rural population. The timing of this new initiative was not coincidental, either, for it was the global economic crisis which had pushed those at the very end of the production chain to the deepest misery. It started as a classic college seminar with regular weekly reading assignments but soon included regular field trips. Already at the end of the first semester, students visited farmlands around Patak and studied them. Later, they visited villages in Hegyalja, Hegyköz, Bodrogköz and other settlements in Upper Hungary. These excursions soon turned into purpose-driven data collection. In addition to geographical, demographical and sociological features, students quickly gained valuable information on ethnography as well, something which could be consulted by following generations. These ‘gathering’ excursions were regulated by strict methodical rules. Before every visit a detailed preparation procedure had to be carried out, this including doing research on the location’s history and literature. Guests from the particular region being studied were often invited to provide sufficient background information. The on-site fieldwork and data collection was conducted according to Újszászy’s precise instructions and, while this gave evidence of a high level of concentration and focus, it also included the possibility of spontaneous discussion of any particular problem which was encountered in the community being studied. In Patak, the program continued with great enthusiasm until 1952, until the theological school functioned. But the movement grew beyond the walls of Patak and became increasingly known and popular. Pál Teleki, the Minister of Education, indicated his intention of expanding the program to a nationwide movement. His plans envisaged having at least two to three hundred college students making such field trips to different parts of Hungary every year. The results of this massive operation were filed in and constitutes the major part of the Database which itself is one unit of the Scholarly Collection in Sárospatak. It contains invaluable and unique treasures dating from the first part of the 20th century about the life of rural folk in the Tisza region and about the traditions and history of these congregations. Already with this one act of documentation, Kálmán Újszászy could have secured a permanent place in the proverbial Pantheon dedicated to prominent individuals of the Bodrog region. THE STRUGGLE AGAINST MARGINALIZATION
