Agria 43. (Az Egri Múzeum Évkönyve - Annales Musei Agriensis, 2007)
Kriston Vízi József: „Őrzőnek rendeltek engem…” Hevesy Sándor és temploma a nyírségi Balkányban
József Kriston Vízi Sándor Hevesy and his Church in Balkány in the Nyírség Having graduated in architecture at Budapest's Technical University, Sándor Hevesy returned to Eger in 1928 to take up a position in the Engineering Office. As the town's chief engineer Hevesy took part in planning of the contemporary county and municipal museum, and the archaeological excavations going on at the castle. He participated in the planning of a number of building projects, such as the municipal waterworks in Petőfi tér, numerous houses and the Roman Catholic church in the Lajosváros district of the town. It was only during the 1940s, however, that he was to be endowed with the title "Eger's chief engineer in perpetuity". It was on his initiative that the Eger Monuments Committee was set up in 1958, and it was under his leadership that efforts were made to move industrial complexes out of the centre of the town and out into the outer-lying areas. While the many hundreds of colour slides of Sándor Hevesy's deposited at the István Dobó Castle Museum Fine Arts and Applied Arts Collection still remain unpublished, as do those in other collections and institutions, the thoroughness with which they were catalogued nevertheless provides us with a lot of interesting information. During the course of our frequent inspection of the slides we discovered for instance that chief engineer Hevesy designed several churches and vicarages during the late 1930s and 1940s, something one fails to find either in biographies of the man, or in peoples' recollections of him. These include the above-mentioned Roman Catholic church in Lajos város dedicated to St Louis, consecrated on 11th November 1937, and the neighbouring vicarage, whose familiarity is due to its being here in Eger. Looking at the slides Hevesy himself produced, however, it becomes clear that there are indeed other churches in the archdiocese that bear his hallmarks. Such was the case with the "Three Villages" Roman Catholic church in the Mátra Hills, built to Hevesy's plans six and half decades ago, and the "railway district" church of St Stephen in Miskolc, likewise designed by Hevesy and Wagner, whose foundation stone is dated 19 th May 1940. Some earlier research of ours has led to the realisation that as work was being started on Miskolc's Selyemrét housing estate during Dr. Béla Halmay's (1881-1953) term as mayor, the town was already in possession of Hevesy's plans for the church there. In the spring of 2006, during the course of a stay in the town of Balkány in Szabolcs-Szatmár-Bereg County, the author was told that the impressive Saint Anthony's Old People's Home, and the Roman Catholic church dedicated to Our 285
