Dénes Dienes: History of the Reformed Church Collég in Sárospatak (Sárospatak, 2013)
János Ugrai: „THE PERIOD OF NATIONAL ADVANCEMENT” 1777-1849 - Rustic Patak and Romantic Zemplén
FROM THE ENLIGHTEMENT TO THE END OF THE WAR OF INDEPENDENCE 82 The romantic Zemplén and were free of the influence of the landlord, or even professors or pastors who were not only well-off by local standards but, in their mode of living, had parted ways with the somewhat traditional, village-like ways. The majority of the townsfolk, however, can be categorized according to their rank in the feudal system and placed into one of the classes of nobles, freemen and bondsmen. The lives of the majority were determined by their livlihood tied to agricultural work, this limiting their financial and educational possibilities. Furthermore, the risks inherent in viticulture and the general Hegyalja crisis, stretching from the end of the 18th century to the initial decades of the 19th century, confronted the inhabitants of the town, causing them grave concerns in their daily subsistence. The generally one-sided farming practiced with outmoded and ineffective equipment boomeranged on the people in Patak and its surrounding area, pushing them into a predicament even more desperate than that elsewhere in the country. The crisis which peaked in the 1810s threatened with true famine in about 1817. It becomes clear from the laments of an unknown letter-writer that because they had not been able to sell their wine - the sole worthy product of Hegyalja - at a respectable price for four years, they had to endure the grotesque despotism of usurer tithe-loaners: “it has been a long time that we have not been able to even crawl, we are barely creeping.” In the light of all this, it is not surprising that the ties between the town and the College, loose as they were, weakened further. In a cultural sense, the College remained an island within Sárospatak. The wine brought economic wealth to the surroundings of the town, to the Zemplén (hill bottom) region with its unique garland of market-towns of some thousand people. In the midst of the towns of Szerencs, Mezőzombor, Tárcái, Tokaj, Tállya, Mád, Bodrogkeresztúr, Tolcsva, Sátoraljaújhely and Királyhelmec, Patak figured as almost the smallest. At the end of the 18th century, the population of both Tállya and Sátoraljaújhely was well over four thousand. Mád’s population was three thousand and the population of the other towns was also well beyond two thousand, only to have these populations unrelentingly decrease in the crisis-striken decades of the beginning of the 19th century. Sátoraljaújhely rose above the rest mostly because of its market rank and it is the only settlement in the entire Zemplén region which is also noteworthy in a national perspective. The market of Sátoraljaújhely was followed in importance by the markets of Tokaj, Patak, Szerencs and Bodrogkeresztúr. These differences, however, were hardly of a large scale. The social make-up of the settlements of Hegyalja and the daily lives of their residents hardly differed from one another. Having a similar source of income brought with it similar troubles and challenges. Some of the smaller or larger towns of the region evolved into smaller centres but, with their characteristically unbalanced economic structure, none of them really rose above the rest. This explains how Zemplén county, although singularly abundant in market-towns, never acquired a dominant centre for its region similar to that of Kassa (Kosice at present) in Abaúj county or to that of Miskolc in Borsod county. Instead, it could claim to have numerous rivals which would, from time to time, alternate in importance. In the absence of a real centre, the unmatched natural beauties of the immediate surroundings made the College special. Lying at the point where the Great Hungarian Plain and the lower extensions of the Carpathian Mountains meet, the Zemplén region is divided into several parts, partly by factors of
