A Debreceni Déri Múzeum Évkönyve 1980 (Debrecen, 1982)

Irodalomtörténet, művelődéstörténet - Fekete Csaba: Hungarian Jerusalem in a Volume of Sermons Published in Debrecen with Dedication and Metrical Verses. 1641

Csaba Fekete HUNGARIAN JERUSALEM IN A VOLUME OF SERMONS PUBLISHED IN DEBRECEN WITH DEDICATION AND METRICAL VERSES 1641 Up to the present century the Reformed Church in Hungary has been titled as Hungarian Sion so as to call into memory the constant suffering betweeen pagan Turk and roman catholic Hapsburgs. On the borderline of hostile forces town Debrecen was named by a XVII

th century preacher Hungarian Jerusalem. The honorable designation is incorporated in a systematically constructed cycle of sermons originaly preached in the House of the Lord to teach and consulate the aggrieved inhabitants in their bitter complaint because of the deplorable destruction caused by day and night fires and fiery instruments detected in exhausting vigilance and though horrified yet faithfully cravening to revive; published for eternal memory of the remnant together with supplication of confession rendered for thise days, and with two hymns of thorough and lamentation. Pál Weszelin Kismarjai, the author (c 1959—1645), studied in Bremen (Germany) together with Coccejus who latter in 1645 foreworded one of his books, namely the first Grammar of Biblical Hebrew by Hungarian author. P. Weszelin Kismarjai used archive documents perished since, was well versed in theology and history, and his dedicatory foreword to the above mentioned sermons is the final but forgotten source of historical accounts on the conflagrations and incendiarism in Debrecen during the XVI

ta and XVII

th centuries up to 1640 when he himself also lost his wife. In order to have rectified some second hand allusions in local historiography and help availability for further study the present paper includs the full text of the dedicatory foreword so far unedited in any modern studies, as it have been preserved in less than five extant copies all around Hungary. P. Weszelin Kismarjai added to his sermons and prayers Hungarian verses vividly describing the fate of Debrecen as doomed by her papist foe burned to ashes. Compared with the common verses of his patron in the same volume, an educated civil authority, the preacher was of first class user of his mother tongue, and showed similar merits in his prosaic stile. The anthologies of Hungarias Poetry in the age of Gabriel Bethlen and George Rákóczi contain most of his verses, but omit some important items composed in hexameters that reflect his rhetorically educated, sensible and inventive mood — though sometimes inclination to use Greco-Roman prosody in place of Hungarian. Having analysed some of the peculiarities of his stile and versification, also characterising his polemic dialogs against antiprotestants, and based on new results of identifying his first printed work preserved only in a unic and mutilated copy, we now have a more realistic mean to evaluate the activity of the town preacher as man of pen and thoughtful registrar of threat and revival. 441