Dénes Dienes: History of the Reformed Church Collég in Sárospatak (Sárospatak, 2013)
EPILOGUE
EPILOGUE 226 war and suffering the consequences of the peace conference decisions was nothing less than a national tragedy and to all this came the consequent unfortunate geographic location of Sárospatak. The town suddenly found itself at the periphery of the country and the newly-drawn international border loped off more than half of the region which had traditionally been the College’s recruitment area. The peripheral character of the region only increased as the rural population slowly sank into poverty and was left to itself, in a defenseless condition. Instead of languishing in this predicament, the College in Sárospatak searched for a way forward and, once again, succeeded, this time through innovations such as the English Residential School (Klebelsberg’s treasured goal), Harsányi’s initiative to discover and nurture talented students and Újszászy’s systematic study of village life. In undertaking the latter two initiatives, the College clearly directed its attention to the rural poor and, in recognizing the challenges of the region with its diverse, social problems, made efforts to identify relevant solutions. Sárospataké standing as a cultural bastion was once again threatened during the rule of state socialism and forced nationalization. At this point, the town’s intellectual base became more heterogeneous and a more specific diversification occurred in the period. While the Patak spirit was able to officially live on within the confines of the Scholarly Collections, the reorganized -on the basis of the new ideology- Teacher Training School (as well as the Rákóczi Museum which was loosely connected to the cultural traditions of the school) provided new opportunities for locally trained professionals to remain in Patak. On behalf of Reformed Church theology, in addition to the already mentioned István Harsányi and Kálmán Újszászy, the theologian Sándor Koncz, together with church historians Mihály Szentimrei and Béla Takács, accumulated timeless merits in keeping the ‘Patak way’ alive. In the Rákóczi Museum, Imre Dankó and Iván Balassa were perhaps the ones whose work yielded the most enduring results. At the Teachers Training School, it was the educational historian József Ködöböcz and the literary and local historian Dániel Kováts, along with the Comenius Society formed in the 1980s, which helped the College rise far above the many average institutions of the nation. We do not want to impose an artificial mathematical regularity onto the past, but history does show that, from time to time, the (school) culture of the College had to face two very significant challenges every one hundred years, and, it was while in these difficult straits that some rather remarkable achievement helped bring deliverance. In the context of a community of such strong faith and deeply-rooted Calvinist beliefs, the explanation behind the mystery becomes self-evident. A further component of this phenomenon deserves to be mentioned. In this history of events, it so happened that a span of time of usually less than two generations passed between every major threat and response cycle. It was this timing which helped the different generations to always discover the common ground and keep their Patak identity continuously alive. Rarely was there a generation whose fathers or grandfathers were not active or passive participants or beneficiaries of the previous major chapter in the history of the College. It is thus nearly impossible to overstate the socio-psychological value of such a situation. The intellectuals of an intellectual centre of a region struggling with serious disadvantages were able to pass on -from one generation to the next- the
