A miskolci ortodox templom és sírkertje (Miskolc, 2001)

A miskolci ortodox templom és sírkertje (Összegzés angolul) Zimányi Katalin

1782-1784 there were three adults and eleven children interred. In 1784 the Greek community bought a parcel in the common cemetery of the town. This parcel was mentioned as „the appointed place for us where to bury" while they were using it. 100 years later, in 1884, the community lost only seven members altogether. One of them was buried in Szolnok, one in the Roman Catholic graveyard, another one in the churchyard and the others were interred in „the common Tetemvár cemetery" that is „the Tetemvár Orthodox graveyard". During the first ten years of the 20* century 25 funerals took place. Though there were burials occasionally in Diósgyőr or in the Avas Calvinist churchyard and in the Roman Catholic graveyard as well, yet, the largest number of the dead was buried in the orthodox graveyard. Only the most prominent persons and the descendants or relatives of the historical merchant families were to be buried in the churchyard. This way the third graveyard had worked from 1782 up to the time of the total assimilation of the orthodox community. (Presently none of those graveyards exists.) The fourth burial-place of the Greek merchants was created in the northern side of the church. The families had set up tombs, sepulchres near to the west, north and east walls of the church but they rarely buried anybody there. Nevertheless in front of the main, western entrance a row of graves was made. Some of them are crypts used until the first third of the 20

th century, some of them are only sepulchres (burial-stones or flatstones) brought there from the graveyards used earlier, after the consecration of the church in 1806. (There are epigraphs in Greek from the 18

th century on the most of these stones, and there are a few either in Greek or in Hungarian from the 19

th century.) In Hungary there has been only a few research workers dealing with the tombstones of Greek language. In 1842 Piroska Prosser, who was the first to publish the Greek epigraphs of the tombstones of the graveyards in the great commercial centres like Buda, Pest, Kecskemét, Komárom, Miskolc, Szentendre and Vác, found 177 legible tombstones altogether. 20 years later Ödön Füves edited his material he had collected in the graveyards of 13 towns. He found and proved the existence of 191 tombstones. Both of the publications discussed 17 sepulchres of the Greek community in Miskolc. In 1951 Szilárd Konstantin Popovics checked the names comparing them with the data of registers of deaths and corrected some mistakes in the publications but he did not find any new correspondences and found the same number of the graves as it was published in 1942.