Dénes Dienes: History of the Reformed Church Collég in Sárospatak (Sárospatak, 2013)
SPIRIT AND MOOD - On a Roller Coaster-the institution in the 1940s
219 ‘school for the poor’. In particular, students from the region of the former Upper Hungary (Felvidék) imposed a great burden on the institution as they came almost completely penniless. In the meantime, much of the school’s former financial sources were slowly exhausted. But these challenges cannot be compared to the turn of events which took place in the 1948-1949 school year. Article XXXIIl/1948 in June declared the The Scholarly Collections By the mid-twentieth century, the library, the archives, the museum and the database Collection had outgrown those school bounds within which it had come into existence throughout history. Its independence, however, was not owed to the concept which was supposed to utilize the values accumulated here for an improved public education; it was owed to the will of a socialist state whose principal efforts were focused on isolating certain sections of society - particularly the youth - from the church. Sections of the main building of the College, where the historic values and treasures were stored, were physically separated from the secondary school and remained in the hands of the Reformed Church. In the socialist concept of culture of the 1950s, the materials collected here were alien to what it described as the “society of the future”. Of the scattered staff of the theological school, only Kalman Újszászy was able to stay in Sárospatak and it became his task to organize the Collections. Characteristic of his very thoroughly educated abilities, he equally excelled in this task amidst impossible conditions (one simple example of this: the central heating system which was installed in the 1930s consisted of pipes channelling heated water throughout the building but, when the College was nationalized, the state authorities literally sawed through the pipes to leave the section of the building left to the church cut off from the central system, thus some other system of heating had to be installed, something which was not an easy task). Újszászy was aware of the fact that students from the state-controlled secondary school and teacher training school would not visit the Collections too often and that he might thus rapidly find himself isolated. In an effort to counteract this once he had organized the Collections, he turned his attention towards scholarly research, to the Reformed Church congregations of the Cistibiscan region and to domestic tourism. He invited the congregations to deposit their valuable religious objects in Patak thus lending a new profile to the museum. The great hall of the College library and the museum exhibitions pertaining to the school’s history and to religious art were opened to the public. He was helped in these tasks by very able assistants, such as the librarians Imre Czegle and Mihály Szen- timrei, museologist Béla Takács, his own wife, museum assistant Ilona Újszászy [née Deák] and archivists János Román and Sándor Koncz. The success of their work with the Collections is evidenced by the rate of growth undergone and the results of their very precise and accurately methodical organization which focused on various research aspects. At the time of the reorganization, close to eighty thousand volumes and three thousand two hundred manuscripts were known to be stored in the building. Only parts of the nationalized natural history collection and physics instruments of the secondary school were relocated to the museum, yet they numbered more than ten thousand. The archives, which operated as the church district’s archives as well since the end of the 19th century, held three hundred eighty linear meters of documents. The collection from village seminars was Újszászy’s favorite section, his personal management and care being readily visible upon examination of the categorization, and he was the one who gave this section the name ‘Database of the Scholarly Collections’. The collections have been well-sup- ported by former students of the College, many of whose legacy of books and manuscripts have contributed significantly to the noticeable growth. After a half-century of academic processing and systematically organized labor in 2010, the inventory is as follows: the Great Library has 572,548 library units, the Database has 228,886 data entries, the Museum has 27,479 units and the Archives has 497.3 linear meters.
