Csaroda and the Hungarian Reformation

This article was recently published by Hungarian Review (Budapest) under the title "CSARODA AND THE HUNGARIAN REFORMATION: A TRAVEL ESSAY". It was published in two parts. Part 1 was published in March 2017 (Volume VIII, No. 2) and Part 2 was published in May 2017 (Volume VIII, No. 3).

In 1946, a Hungarian poet stood in front of the Reformation Wall in the Parc des Bastions in Geneva. Gyula Illyés's poem - Before the Reformation Monument in Geneva - is now regarded as one of the most important Hungarian poems of the 20th century, standing alongside his better known 1950 poem One Sentence on Tyranny. In his poem, Gyula Illyés (1902-1983), in his Paris youth a left-wing activist from a Roman Catholic paternal background, asks the question "Do you believe there would be a Hungarian nation if there had been no Calvin?" His answer is "I do not think so."

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You cannot climb the tower of the church in Csaroda. But if you could you would look out across a flat land stretching away from you in all directions. The horizon to the east is today in the Ukraine. In every other direction you are looking at country that has been part of Hungary for more than a thousand years. This province is called Bereg. Only a small part of historical Bereg remains within Hungary today. The rest of it, including its capital - Beregszász - lies to the north and today within Ukraine. Beregszász has been outside the borders of Hungary since 1920 - first in Czechoslovakia, then in the Soviet Union, then in Ukraine. But its population, still majority Hungarian speaking, voted in 2010 to change the town's name from the Ukrainian "Berehove" back to the Hungarian "Beregszász".

The Reformed Church at Csaroda

In 895, forced westward from their homelands on the Pontic Steppe by a very unpleasant people known as the Pechenegs, the wandering Hungarian - or Magyar - tribes, under the leadership of Arpád, crossed the Carpathian passes into the Carpathian Basin. Later generations of Hungarians would frequently draw parallels between their own nation and the Children of Israel in the Old Testament, an analogy that still finds a voice, sometimes a rather fanciful voice, in remote corners of the internet.[1]

The Promised Land that the Magyars found in the Carpathian Basin is said to have reminded them of their homeland to the east. If you want to see why that might have been so, travel west from Debrecen across the utterly flat Great Hungarian Plain - the Pannonian Plain - the Alföld in Hungarian. Some of the plain is now the Hortobágy National Park. Here is the largest continuous stretch of natural grasslands in Europe, the farthest west extension of the Eurasian steppe. At the end of a hot summer it looks like a desert. The upright timbers of "heron wells" - the ancient Middle Eastern sweep well known in Arabic as shaduf - dot the landscape and protected herds of long-horned Hungarian Grey Cattle raise far-off dust clouds as they roam among distant mirages. The ancestors of these iconic pale cattle probably arrived here with the incoming Magyar tribes in the 9th century. Az Alföld, a poem by Sándor Petöfi (1823-1849), considered by many to be Hungary's national poet, did much to foster the image of the Great Plain as the quintessential Hungarian countryside.

On closer inspection, though, you do see water in this desert-like landscape. It comes as a surprise to see despondent earth-caked water buffaloes wallowing in muddy sloughs. We walked alongside the overgrown ponds of an abandoned fish farm, that once exported its product as far as the markets of Amsterdam, and watched an ornithologist ring a reed warbler before releasing it to continue its journey to Africa. "There are fewer of them now," he said. "Climate change is widening the Sahara and it becomes more difficult for these little birds to make it across to their winter habitats." Or else they are trapped, killed and eaten in Cyprus, where songbirds are an illegal delicacy, and never make it to Africa.

By contrast, the natural vegetation of the countryside around Csaroda is forest and still, between the orchards, fields and pastures that separate the tidy villages, woodland breaks up the views to the horizon. It is also a low-lying land that has long been prone to floods, often on a devastating scale. Levees have been built along the course of the river Tisza to protect the villages and farmland. Some of the many bicycle tracks that connect the villages of Bereg run along the tops of these dykes. When you cycle along the track past the church at Tivadar, you are level with its roof.

The Reformed Church at Tivadar

We dined one night on hearty bowls of catfish soup liberally seasoned with paprika. The fish had come from the Tisza. There was a recent season, however, when local fish was off the menu. In 2000, a tailings pond at a gold mine near Baia Mare in Romania burst its dam. The cyanide-laced muck made its way down the tributaries into the Tisza. All the fish died. Hungary has since then led the campaign to ban the use of cyanide in gold-mining operations. And the offending gold mine has recently been closed down.

Within ten years of arriving, the Magyars had conquered the entire Carpathian Basin and, from their new home, were raiding the settled lands to the west and south. Then, in 1000, King Stephen (a descendant of Arpád, later canonised, and now gracing the 10,000 forint note) accepted Christianity and Hungary became a settled Roman Catholic kingdom. This Christian coronation at the dawn of the millennium has become a seminal event in Hungarians' interpretation of their history. The 2011 Hungarian Constitution begins with a reference to it: "We are proud that our king Saint Stephen built the Hungarian State on solid ground and made our country a part of Christian Europe one thousand years ago."

Uniquely among all the tribes that invaded Europe from across the Pontic Steppe over the centuries - Huns, Avars, Mongols, Tatars - the Magyars founded an enduring nation, and established their impossible Uralic language in a sea of Indo-European - Germanic, Slavic, Romance - speakers. "Hungarian is actually a very easy language," I was told. "In Hungary even young children learn it." Give or take Croatia and the fracturing of the country during the time of the Turks, the geographic extent of Hungary remained more or less as it was in the time of St Stephen until the Treaty of Trianon in 1920.

In adopting Roman Catholicism, Hungary also established itself as the south-eastern bulwark of Western Christendom. To its south and east, the populations faced Byzantium rather than Rome. In due course, and with one exception (Russia), all those Orthodox kingdoms - including Constantinople itself - fell to the Muslim Ottoman Empire. That put Hungary in the first line of defence against the rising power of the day.

In the summer of 1456, three years after the fall of Constantinople, the Ottoman armies sought to conquer the Kingdom of Hungary. A force of somewhere between 60,000 and 160,000, under the command of the Turkish Sultan, set out to besiege the strategic border fortress of Nándorfehérvár, now Belgrade in Serbia, then on the southern frontiers of Hungary. The defence fell to John Hunyadi, Voivode of Transylvania, who had spent most of his life battling Turkish encroachment. Alongside his troops were sling-and-scythe-wielding peasants enthused for, and led in, the cause of defending Christendom by Giovanni da Capestrano, a seventy-year-old Franciscan friar. In all, the Hungarian force numbered less than 30,000. Yet the siege was broken and in a spontaneous battle outside the walls the Sultan's troops were scattered and the Sultan himself wounded.

Of such significance was the looming Siege of Belgrade to Western Christendom that the Pope ordered church bells everywhere to be rung at noon each day to remind the faithful to pray for the defenders of the fortress. The "noon bell" soon turned into a commemoration of the Hungarian victory, and in many churches across Europe the "noon bell" still rings.

In the weeks after the victory, Giovanni da Capestrano (later canonised) and John Hunyadi (now remembered as one of Hungary's greatest heroes) both died of the plague - a vicious side-effect of medieval warfare. But John Hunyadi's prestige as a scourge of the Turks was a key factor in the election of his son, Matthias Corvinus (whose portrait is on the 1000 forint note), as King of Hungary in 1457. The Battle of Belgrade and the reign of Matthias Corvinus, one of Hungary's greatest kings, were key to keeping the Turks out of central Europe for the next sixty years. The preamble to the 2011 Hungarian Constitution: "We are proud that our people has over the centuries defended Europe in a series of struggles..."

Belgrade did, however, eventually fall to the Ottomans - in 1521. Then, in 1526, the Turks were back with a huge army (and this time in an anti-Habsburg alliance with François I of France that shocked Christendom) led by the greatest of all the Ottoman Sultans, Suleiman the Magnificent. At the fatal Battle of Mohács, the much smaller Hungarian army was wiped out. Her young king Louis II died in a flooded brook while retreating from the battle.

The Battle of Mohács, on 29 August 1526, is one of the most significant in European history. It marked the end of the powerful medieval Kingdom of Hungary. It brought Muslim Turkish power into central Europe. Hungary had to pay tribute to Istanbul and, from 1541, the country was in effect divided into three. The central part of the kingdom, including Buda, the royal capital, became a Turkish province, complete with mosques and hammams. The former are gone now, but the steamy successors to the Turkish baths still abound. The west and the north became Royal Hungary, paying tribute to the Ottomans, but under the rule of the Habsburgs in Vienna. The east became the Principality of Transylvania, under Turkish suzerainty but, within those bounds, pretty well an independent Hungarian state.

Mohács brought the Habsburgs, then aggrandising their domains through clever marriage alliances, into the non-German speaking lands of Bohemia and Hungary; for Louis II had been king not only of Hungary and Croatia but also of Bohemia. The Habsburgs eyed the empty thrones with interest. The crowns of both Hungary and Bohemia had both been elective. The Habsburgs now insisted that they should be hereditary and therefore theirs. But Bohemia was largely Hussite, Hungary was increasingly Protestant, and the Habsburgs saw themselves as the bulwark of the Roman church and, as time progressed, of the Counter-Reformation. Problems loomed.

Take a step back: events that were taking place elsewhere in Europe would bring changes more profound than Mohács to Western Christendom and find a powerful and lasting echo in Hungary. On 31 October 1517, Martin Luther (1483-1546) nailed his ninety-five theses to a church door in Wittenberg and as early as 1523 Lutheran doctrines were being taught in Buda. In that year an edict was promulgated in Hungary with penalties of loss of life and property for Lutherans. Nonetheless, in the words of J.D Wylie's History of Protestantism, an old leather-bound set of three nineteenth-century volumes that once belonged to my great-grandfather and that sat on the bookshelves of my childhood homes, "Perhaps in no country of Europe were the doctrines of the Reformation so instantaneously and so widely diffused as in Hungary." By 1600, 90% of Hungary was Protestant. How do we account for this?

While in much of western Europe feudalism was in retreat, in Hungary it was consolidating in the 15th and early 16th centuries. Hungary sits on some of the most productive agricultural land in Europe and the growing populations to the west represented an increasing source of demand for Hungary's grain, cattle and pigs. Big farming operations were needed to exploit the opportunities. G.R Elton, Reformation Europe, 1517-1559 (1963): "Personal liberty gave way to serfdom; peasant farming to estate farming; and estate farming on that scale created effectively independent domains in the hands of great owners. A weak monarchy conceded rights of rule." Fear of a national strongman had led to less than fulsome support for John Hunyadi's 1456 defence of Belgrade and, after the authoritarian rule of his son, Matthias Corvinius, to the deliberate election of weak successors to the crown of St Stephen - the Apostolic Crown of Hungary. In 1526, much of the Hungarian nobility had declined to send troops to Mohács. After Mohács, there were two rival kings - the Habsburg claimant and John Zápolya - and a crisis of national identity.

The church, too, had lost its independent voice. G.R. Elton again: "The Hungarian Church, in fact, was effectively dead, controlled and staffed by king and nobles with virtually no spiritual life left in it at all." Only a few Franciscan voices spoke out against the status quo. A spiritual vacuum was waiting to be filled. With the fracturing of central power after the Battle of Mohács, persecution of religious dissent became more difficult. The many German-speaking communities in Hungary and the advent of printing presses meant that there was ready access to the ideas of Luther, Melanchthon, Zwingli, Bullinger, Bucer and others.

Turkish rule was harsh. When it eventually ended in Hungary, the lands that had been under direct Turkish rule were largely depopulated. Twenty-two villages of Hortobágy and all their inhabitants had been wiped out, never to be resettled - contributing no doubt to the desert-like appearance of the area to this day. Others who lived in Turkish-ruled regions escaped to Transylvania or Royal Hungary. But the Turks were largely indifferent as to whether their Christian subjects were Roman Catholic or Protestant and this in itself gave an advantage to the Protestants. In fact, given their Muslim abhorrence of images, the Ottomans probably looked marginally more favourably at Protestant, and particularly Reformed, places of worship. When they realised that the Protestants were also opposed to the Habsburgs, the Ottomans sometimes encouraged Protestant preachers. "The Reformed gained their ascendancy in Hungary not least because Reformed Protestantism was an emphatic rejection of Habsburg allegiance." (Diarmaid MacCulloch, Reformation, 2003.) In the late 18th century a worried member of the Council of State said "If I ask a Calvinist peasant what his religion is, he answers: I am Hungarian by faith. The reign of the Hungarian language will mean Calvinist reign." (Quoted in Botond Gaál, Calvinist Features on the Spiritual Face of the Hungarians, 2007). To be Hungarian was to be Reformed.

Over the next two centuries of conflict between Ottomans and Habsburgs, persecution of Hungarian Protestants was at its most severe when the Habsburgs were in the ascendancy and waned when the Ottomans were more powerful. To this day, although there are Reformed congregations throughout Hungary, the geographic strongholds of the Hungarian Reformed Church are in those parts of the country farthest from Vienna - in the Great Plain, in the east of modern Hungary, and among the ethnic Hungarians in Romania.

Interior of the Reformed Church at Csaroda

The simple but beautiful little church in Csaroda is a Reformed church. (The Hungarian Református is often translated into English, as it is on the sign outside the church in Csaroda, as "Calvinist". Jean Calvin (1509-1564), the French-born, "second-generation" Reformer, who led the Reformation in Geneva, was the most prominent theologian of the Reformed party. But he was by no means the only one.) We stood, awaiting the keyholder, in the shade of one of the many trees in the green area that surrounds the church. Wasps hovered over a purple carpet of fallen plums fermenting in the heat. Beyond the whitewashed church, a thatched whitewashed house stood. In the other direction were long south-facing houses with their gable ends to the street. In the garden of one of them the upright timbers of a swing well preserved a memory of a bygone age. There has been a village here for a very long time. We reflected on its name: Csaroda.

Place names and the layers of memory they perpetuate are endlessly fascinating, and none more so than, despite their fierce exteriors, those of Hungary. Even if your map did not mark the river Tisza, you could trace its course through villages with the "Tisza-" prefix - Tiszabecs, Tiszakóród, Tiszaszalka, Tiszavid... The prefix "Kun-" marks places where Turkic-speaking Cuman refugees were settled in the 13th century on lands depopulated by the devastating Mongol raids of 1241 that killed possibly half of Hungary's population - Kuncsorba, Kunhegyes, Kunmadaras... Jászberény, Jászjákóhalma and Jásztelek tell of the Jassi people, who spoke an Iranian language and who retained a degree of autonomy until 1876. And what about Hajdúböszörmény? "Böszörmény" is an old Hungarian word for Muslim and we know that Muslims, migrants from the steppe, lived hereabouts until the 12th century. Early in the 17th century, István Bocskay ennobled 9254 free peasants who had supported him against the Habsburgs. The prefix "Hajdú-" denotes their towns. Lurking beneath the name "Livada", a town in northern Romania where the population is still more than 60% Hungarian, is its old Hungarian name, "Sárköz". A former President of France draws his name from here. It means "muddy alley". Csaroda derives its name from the Slavic tongue of its pre-Magyar inhabitants - čierna voda, "black water".

The Csaroda church dates from the 13th century. The wooden spire is more recent. The church's thick whitewashed exterior walls are pierced by only a few tall thin Romanesque windows. In front of you, as you enter the narrow door, are the smiling faces of Byzantine-style saints that date from the early years of the church. Another medieval (14th century) fresco covers the walls of the apse. In 1555, the church of Csaroda became definitively Reformed. The images of the old religion were covered over with a white plaster and there they remained, hidden for more than 400 years. In 1642, the plaster was redecorated with the floral patterns and text lauding the church's patron that are still there. It was not until the 1970s that work was undertaken to uncover and display the medieval artwork.

Geometric, cross-stitch embroidery decorates the pulpit, the central table and some of the wooden pews. Despite the church being long and thin, built originally with a focus on the altar at the east end of the church and the celebration of the mass, the pews are now set out on three sides of a square around the communion table and pulpit. An intricately carved hood hovers over the pulpit. The focus is now on the "Word", the reading of the Bible and the preaching of the sermon. The seating arrangement, recognising equality before God, would not look out of place in a Presbyterian Highland kirk.

You would also see a similar seating plan in a Reformed church in the Netherlands. For instance, in the rather grander setting of the Great Church of Haarlem - the former cathedral church of St Bavo that became definitively Reformed in 1578, twenty-three years after Csaroda - the pulpit with its carved hood stands against a thick Romanesque column towards the west end of the towering Gothic nave. At the foot of the pulpit is the table and around it on three sides are rows of simple wooden chairs with straw seats. On a Sunday morning some will sit here with their backs to the site of the former altar from the church's Roman Catholic past, far away at the east end of the building.

We travelled along the empty back roads of Bereg, and those south of the river Tisza in the old county of Szatmár. Fields of maize and over-ripe sunflowers awaited harvest. Dry, dusty tracks led away between woods and field. All the houses seemed to cluster in villages. We saw no farmhouses in the fields between them. The villages were quiet, tidy and resplendent in late summer flowers - geraniums, canna lilies, marigolds, petunias, black-eyed susans... If there were a village fleuri prize in these parts, it would be a serious competition; but in the end I would award it to Kömörő. Along the street that leads to the strange cemetery at Szatmárcseke, where the wooden headstones seem to be modelled on upended boats with a series of notches carved into them, the hot afternoon air smelled wonderfully of plum jam being made.

Every village here has a parish church in its centre. Every one of them is a Reformed church. Where they were unlocked we went in and saw the same Genevan lay-out of the pews around the pulpit that we saw at Csaroda, the same simple white-washed walls, the cross-stitch-embroidered linen decorating the simple furnishings, the painted or carved hood over the pulpit. We found a Greek Catholic church on the outskirts of Beregdaróc. It was a couple of hundred metres from the Ukrainian border, bore the date 1955, and its gate was padlocked. We passed an ill-kempt Roman Catholic church near Beregsurány. If there are other churches in the area that are not Reformed we did not find them.

The village of Tákos lies three kilometres west of Csaroda. Its peaceful, wide, main street is flanked by substantial, solid houses, each almost of identical size, each fronted by flowers. The street is two streets really, so broad is the green area in its middle. The tiny (Reformed, of course) church here, on the long green, is one of the most charming we saw in Bereg. The floor is made of dull-red, baked-earth tiles. The ceiling is low and wooden panelled. On each panel is a painted floral design. Similar designs, all in colours muted by time, decorate the fronts of the pews and the balcony. The pews are arranged here too on three sides of a square, facing a round table. The table - and the tops of the front pews - are covered with linen cloths embroidered in red. A painted pottery vase with flowers in it stands on the table. In this simple place the art is straightforward, dignified, folk art. Gone are the elaborate painted images that were meant to aid worship but which had, in the Reformed view, ended up distracting from true worship of God. The walls were plain white.

The interior of the Reformed Church at Takos

Diarmaid MacCulloch says that "to step into a Transylvanian Reformed church building was often to find a riot of newly painted colour and even figure decoration that would alarm censorious western European Calvinists." We saw none of this, however, in the churches we visited in Bereg and Szatmár. Tákos was the most decorated among them and even it had no images.

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The Reformation in Hungary began with Lutheran ideas, but as the rediscovered principle of studying the Bible to find out what it actually said gained ground, Hungary became open to a wide ranges of ideas from abroad, and within Hungary home-grown theologies developed. By the 1550s, theological opinion among most Hungarian-speaking theologians was coalescing around a position similar to that of the Swiss, or Reformed, party. In 1562, Heinrich Bullinger (1504-1575), Zwingli's successor at the Grossmünster in Zurich, wrote out his personal statement of belief. When published a few years later, this became the Second Helvetic Confession and, together with the Heidelberg Catechism, the main statement of Reformed faith. The Hungarian Reformed Church willingly adopted the Second Helvetic Confession in 1567; and both it and the Heidelberg Confession remain its fundamental statements of faith to this day.

In parallel with Calvinism there was also a significant Unitarian voice in Hungary in Ferenc Dávid. Slovaks and the Saxon population of Transylvania continued to maintain a more Lutheran outlook. In 1568, the Diet of Torda granted freedom of religion - a first in Europe. The 1568 Edict renounced the idea of a national established religion and gave legal guarantees to Catholic, Lutheran, Calvinist and Unitarian congregations. Orthodox, Muslims and Jewish ones were to be formally tolerated, though without legal guarantees. In Transylvania, where the Edict had effect, the leading party was Calvinist - or Reformed.

Hand in hand with the reform in the Church, Hungarian Reformers sought to address what they saw as Hungary's backward state compared to western European countries. The key tool for national renewal that they adopted was education. Before the Reformation there were only some seventy schools in the whole of Hungary, all attached to monasteries, and no universities. Three major theological colleges were founded in the early stages of the Reformation: Pápa in Transdanubia (1531) and Sárospatak (1531) and Debrecen (1538) in the east. Each is still functioning today.

The Library of the Calvinist College of Sarospatak

Many Hungarian towns still trace the foundation of their local secondary school to the Reformation. Indeed, the entire Hungarian school system has its origin in the Hungarian Reformed Church. Debrecen alone founded 584 schools. In the words of the Péter Melius Juhász (1532-1572), who, as Minister of the church in Debrecen, was one of the major Hungarian reformers of the second half of the 16th century, "Found a school from every church." The schools taught in Hungarian (which, with increasing pressures to Germanise, was almost seditious in itself) and, in order to ensure connection with the wider world, also taught Latin to their pupils. The place of Latin in Hungary remained for many years. Only in  1844 did the Hungarian Parliament and courts stop using Latin as their official language.

Reflecting the egalitarian trend in Reformed Protestantism, the new schools made particular provision for the poor. Márton Szilágyi Tönkő (1642-1700), for example, was a serf child educated by the new school system. He rose to become Professor of Physics at Debrecen Reformed College and was only liberated from serfdom after he had become a full Professor. In Scotland he would have been known as a "lad o'pairts".

Calvin's theology emphasised the unity of the Old and New Testaments, and the Reformed party in general had a higher view of the Old Testament than was accorded to it by either the Catholics or the Lutherans. Hungarians, under foreign rule and subject to persecution for their Reformed faith, took comfort in the Prophets' call for social justice and Old Testament stories of national liberation and renewal. In a theme that recurs regularly in Hungarian history, they saw themselves as being in some ways similar to Israel of the Old Testament. In these circumstances, the Reformed views of authority, "tyrants" and liberty were significant.

The Central Figures on the Reformation Wall in Geneva

Farel, Calvin, Beza and Knox

For Calvin, the purpose of civil government included "to foster and maintain the external worship of God, to defend sound doctrine and the condition of the church." (Institutes, IV.2). He opposed the growing absolutism that would culminate in the theories of the "divine right of kings" and thought that hereditary "monarchy is prone to tyranny" (Institutes, IV.20). His favoured form of government was one in which the aristocracy, or lesser (possibly elected) magistrates, operated checks and balances on the king's power. His political philosophy gave the power of rebellion to these lesser magistrates when the king commanded what was contrary to God's revealed word. But, because tyranny was ultimately preferable to anarchy, Calvin did not accord this right to the common people. Others  - John Knox, Theodore Beza, Philippe du Plessis-Mornay (the probable author of the 1579 tract Vindiciae, Contra Tyrannos) - in the emerging Reformed camp however, went further, especially after the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre of Protestants in Paris in 1572. Bullinger, going beyond where Calvin himself ever went, discerned the condemnation of tyranny, and its source in evil, in Christ's words quoted in Luke 22:53: "But this is your hour, and the power of darkness" (Authorised Version). Bullinger had accepted the position as minister of the Grossmünster in Zurich only on the basis that he would be free to criticise the government from the pulpit.

Reformed political theory, and the Old Testament imagery that came so readily to it, had a marked impact too on the emerging nationalism of the Netherlands, then waging its own war against Habsburg tyranny. "In this Netherlandish addendum to the Old Testament, the United Provinces featured as the new Zion, Philip II as a king of Assyria and William the Silent as a godly captain of Judah" (Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches, 1987). In Dutch literature and art of the time, Philip II is also frequently compared to Pharaoh. Simon Schama: "Of all the scriptural analogies for patriotic history, none was more obviously compelling than the Exodus." In a curious echo of the Muslims' greater tolerance of Reformed Protestantism that we saw in Transylvania, rebels against the Habsburgs in the Netherlands often wore a medallion in the shape of a crescent moon bearing the legend "Better a Turk than a Papist".

In English-speaking countries Reformed thought on social order, tyranny and rebellion had its influence right down the very text of the English translations of the Bible itself. In a 2011 article The Geneva Bible, Nick Spencer traces the history of English translations of the Bible in the 16th and 17th centuries. Henry VIII authorised a Bible translation to compete with Tyndale's version that was circulating illegally and being read widely throughout England. While Tyndale's translation was small and capable of easy and clandestine circulation, Henry's Great Bible (1539) was of large format, kept chained in churches and under the control of the clergy. Nick Spencer: "Its frontispiece depicted society as it ought to be. An enthroned Henry dominated. Above him God was squeezed rather uncomfortably into a tiny heaven, from where he blessed the monarch. The King then passed the Word of God to Archbishop Thomas Cranmer and Thomas Cromwell, who in turn passed it to clergy and the laity respectively, the picture reaching all the way down to a few, bedraggled traitors, languishing in Newgate Prison for their refusal to honour the king."

When Mary Tudor ("Bloody Mary") ascended the throne and began to execute Protestants in England, a number of Reformers fled the country, many finding refuge in Geneva. There, drawing on "the scholarship of Calvin and Beza and contemporary French versions" (Owen Chadwick, The Reformation, 1964) and making considerable use of Tyndale's work,  they made yet another English translation of the Bible. The so-called "Geneva Bible", published in full in 1560, was in a small format, printed in easy-to-read font, cheap, and intended to be read by everyone. It was the first English Bible to use verse numbers, a 1551 innovation by Geneva printer Robert Estienne that has been followed in all subsequent translations. In contrast to the "busy, authoritarian image on the front of the Great Bible, the dominant image of the Geneva Bible depicted a key moment from Exodus" (Spencer, 2011) - liberation from slavery, a narrative that resonated, perhaps even more strongly than in England, in contemporary Hungary and the Netherlands.

The text of the Geneva Bible famously used the word "tyrant", and was accompanied by extensive notes on the text, including "seditious notes" that "unapologetically discussed the many occasions in the Old Testament (and it was the Old: the New proved much less politically contentious) in which the people or their leaders had legitimately resisted or even overthrown tyrants..." (Spencer, 2011)

Elizabeth I disliked the Geneva Bible and commissioned the "Bishops' Bible", large in format and seen as a pillar of social order. But the Geneva Bible remained popular, and when James VI of Scotland, who had an even higher view of royal authority than Elizabeth, ascended the English throne as James I, he commissioned yet another translation, published in 1611, which has come to be known as the "King James" or "Authorised" version. The word "tyrant" was absent. In due course, the Geneva Bible was banned. Nick Spencer: "In the textual tussle between freedom and order, order had won."

But perhaps, outwith the text, not entirely. When Charles I was put on trial, and then executed, the accusation levelled against him was that he was a "tyrant, traitor and murderer". And when the Mayflower Pilgrims sailed for the New World in 1620, it was the Geneva Bible that went with them. A hundred-and-fifty years later echoes of Geneva surfaced in the American Revolution and the founding documents of the United States. Benjamin Franklin proposed adopting for America's Great Seal the image from Exodus of Moses with his arm raised while Pharaoh and his army drown in the Red Sea surrounded by the words "Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God". Thomas Jefferson, the new country's third President, took "Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God" as his personal motto.

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Towards the end of the 16th century, Ottoman power temporarily waned and, with the Habsburgs in the ascendant, persecution of Protestants in Hungary again gathered strength. The ruthless régime of Giorgio Basta, attempting to Germanise and Catholicise Hungary on behalf of the Habsburgs between 1601 and 1604, is remembered as one of Hungary's most miserable periods. Tyranny led to rebellion. The rebellion was supported by the Hungarian Estates and, tacitly, by the Ottomans. The armies of its leader, István Bocskay (1557-1606), a Calvinist magnate from Bihar, defeated the Austrians. At the 1606 Peace of Vienna, the freedom of worship in Hungary was acknowledged and offices in Royal Hungary were made open regardless of religion. Back home, István Bocskay was proclaimed as "the Moses of the Hungarians".

The Statue of Bocskay on the Reformation Wall in Geneva

For his role in defending the rights of Protestants in Hungary, István Bocskay earned himself a place on the Reformation Wall in Geneva. In the middle of that wall - built in 1909, the 400th anniversary of Calvin's birth - are the Reformation theologians Calvin, Beza, Farel and Knox, towering over the others. Of the statues spread out along the wall beside them, four are of men who rose up against the established authorities - "tyrants" - in a manner inspired by Reformed teaching. In addition to István Bocskai, they are Oliver Cromwell (leader of the Parliamentarians in the English Civil War), William the Silent (who led the Dutch revolt against Spanish Habsburg rule in the Netherlands), Gaspard de Coligny (military leader of the French Huguenots). The fifth, Frederick William of Brandenburg, the Calvinist "Great Elector", was also a military leader. The odd man out here is Roger Williams, the Massachusetts Separatist who founded the colony of Rhode Island.

István Bocskay was elected King of Hungary and his Turkish friends gave him a royal crown (made in Persia: but, ironically, you now have to go to the Schatzkammer in Vienna to see it). But he declined the honour and died, possibly poisoned, not long after the Peace of Vienna. Bocskai's eventual successor, from 1613, as Prince of Transylvania was Gábor Bethlen (1580-1629). Under his rule, the Principality of Transylvania reached it greatest territorial extent and maximum influence. Bethlen's face is on Hungary's 2000 Forint note.  

From the Peace of Vienna in 1606 to 1660, under Gábor Bethlen (like István Bocskay, elected King of Hungary but never crowned) and his successors as Princes of Transylvania, George I Rákóczi and George II Rákóczi, Transylvania enjoyed its golden age. Hungarian culture flourished. Although its princes and leading men were Calvinist, there was a high degree of religious toleration in the spirit of the 1568 Diet of Torda. During this period, Protestantism in Habsburg-ruled Royal Hungary was kept relatively free from persecution through pressure from Transylvania, backed up by the potential for, and sometimes actual, military intervention. It helped too that Austria's attentions were consumed by the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648) that began when the Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor tore up the Peace of Augsburg (1555), that had settled the map of Germany between Catholics and Lutherans, and tried to impose religious uniformity throughout Habsburg domains. The Hussites/Protestants of Bohemia rebelled. Protestant academics, many fleeing from the horrors of the Thirty Years' War, found refuge in Transylvania and its young universities.

But then Transylvania overreached itself. Inspired by ideas that Hungary was the modern-day Israel and perhaps by a strain of Calvinist millenarianism, George II Rákóczi ("cast as King David, who might usher in a golden age for humanity" (MacCulloch, 2003)) went to war in Poland without the consent of his Ottoman overlords. His wings were clipped and the effective independence of Transylvania came to an end, although it remained a separate legal entity until 1711. In 1671, the Habsburgs suspended constitutional liberties in Hungary. Schools and Protestant churches were closed. A period still known in Hungary as the "Decade of Mourning" ensued. In 1674, 700 Protestant preachers were arrested, accused of high treason and many were sent as slaves to the galleys in the Mediterranean. The country seethed with discontent.

Only with the return of the Ottoman threat did the Habsburg king back down and confirm Protestant rights in Hungary - at the Diet of Sopron in 1681. But the Austrians soon regained the upper hand. After the defeat of the Turks at the Battle of Vienna in 1683, the Habsburgs occupied Hungary. While Austrian successes in the Great Turkish War were a cause of rejoicing in much of Europe, it was the opposite for Protestant Hungary. Hungary was treated as a conquered, rather than a liberated, country. Cardinal Leopold Karl von Kollonitsch - a soldier, count of the Holy Roman Empire and Archbishop of Esztergom - was put in charge of reorganising the country for the Habsburgs, saying that he would "first render Hungary obedient, then destitute, and finally Catholic". The Counter-Reformation, whatever its methods, proved to be successful. According to the 1949 census, the first under the Communists, religious affiliation in Hungary was then:

Roman Catholic: 67.8%

Reformed (Calvinist): 21.9%

Evangelical (Lutheran): 5.2%

Greek Catholic: 2.7%

Jewish: 1.5%

Orthodox: 0.4%

Other or none: 0.5%

(Among ethnic Hungarians in Romania, some 55% come from a Reformed background.)

Interior of the Reformed Church at Tarpa

Some ten kilometres to the south east of Csaroda will bring you to the village of Tarpa. Tarpa is the biggest village in the region and its whitewashed Gothic, Reformed church is the largest of the church buildings we saw in Bereg. Between the church and the town hall, stands a statue. The man on the horse is Ferenc II Rákóczi (1676-1735), the last Prince of Transylvania. The Rákóczis were one of the richest families in Hungary and for generations staunch defenders of Protestantism. The first complete Bible in Hungarian, Gáspár Károli's translation, was printed at Vizsoly in 1590, on Rákóczi lands and under their protection. The Rákóczi castle at Sárospatak, that features on the back of the current Hungarian 500 Forint note, lies only a few hundred metres from the Calvinist College of Sárospatak. But the advance of the Counter-Reformation in Habsburg-ruled Hungary was such that even the Rákóczis had converted to Roman Catholicism by the end of the 17th century. Nonetheless, it was a Rákóczi - Ferenc II Rákóczi, the man on the horse in Tarpa and also on the front of the 500 forint note - who led the most serious 18th century Hungarian rebellion against the Habsburgs, the Second Kuruc War (1703-1711). "Kuruc" is a name of uncertain origin given to the mainly Protestant peasants and serfs who fought the Habsburg authorities after 1671 on and off until 1711. In the tourist literature of today, Tarpa proudly refers to itself as a "Kuruc town" and celebrates "Kuruc Days" each July. Defeated in the end, Ferenc II Rákóczi, the last of his line, spent the rest of his days in exile at a villa on the shores of the Sea of Marmara, deep in the Ottoman Empire.

Statue of Ferenc II Rakoczi at Tarpa

*

A few days after visiting Csaroda, we met Dr Botond Gaál in front of the Great Church in Debrecen. Dr Gaál was born in Vámosatya, a village in Bereg, just to the northwest of Csaroda. He is a mathematician and physicist by background, a recently retired Professor of Systematic Theology and a Doctor of the Hungarian Academy of Science. We were joined by his wife, Mária, and Rev. István Oláh shortly afterwards, and spent several happy hours together in the church, in the coffee-cum-book shop behind it and on a shaded bench in the courtyard of the adjacent college - learning about the Hungarian Reformed Church from the 16th century to the present day.

If there is a centre of Reformed Church in Hungary today it is the Great Church of Debrecen. The yellow baroque building that towers over the centre of Debrecen dates from the early 19th century. It stands on the site of two earlier churches each destroyed by fire, the more recent in 1802, that also destroyed much of the town. Through what looks like a cupboard door in the coffee shop, you enter a semi-subterranean room where the foundations of the both the earlier churches are visible.

Interior of the Great Church of Debrecen

Like the smaller versions we saw in Bereg, the Great Church of Debrecen has white undecorated walls and centres on a lofty pulpit and a famous organ, faced by pews on three sides. The only representational decorations are flames in cups representing the Holy Spirit (B.B. Warfield famously said that Calvin was "pre-eminently the theologian of the Holy Spirit"); and grapes, wheat and water portraying, in inlaid wood, the two sacraments - Holy Communion and Baptism. We saw there, too, an original copy of Károli's 1590 Bible and Lajos Kossuth's chair.

The revolutionary year 1848 has gone down in European history as the "springtime of nations". The Austrian Empire suffered as much upheaval in 1848-9 as any other European country, beginning in Vienna and then spreading. Because of the multi-ethnic character of the Austrian Empire, the demands for democracy and civil liberties rapidly became mixed up with nationalism. The most serious rebellion came from Hungary, still technically a separate country with its own institutions within the overarching Austrian Empire; but increasingly, since the Napoleonic Wars, under the control of Austria's reactionary absolutism and Metternich's desire for uniformity throughout the Empire.

As early as the spring of that revolutionary year, Hungary was effectively an independent state, although the formal Declaration of Independence would be another year in coming. Lajos Kossuth (1802-1894) was the country's Prince-Regent. Kossuth came from a strict Lutheran family and some of his education had been at the Sárospatak Calvinist College. Sándor Petőfi (1823-1849) and Mór Jókai (1825-1904) (poet and novelist, respectively, and each a prominent voice in the 1848/9 War of Independence) met when they were students together at the Calvinist College of Pápa.

Sándor Petőfi's poem "National Song", written on 15 March 1848, was instrumental in the events of that year.

On your feet, Magyar, the homeland calls!
The time is here, now or never!
Shall we be slaves or free?
This is the question, choose your answer! -
By the God of the Hungarians
We vow,
We vow, that we will be slaves
No longer![2]

The "Word" is important in Reformed theology and practice. The modern Hungarian language was developed in that context, and literature and poetry emerged from it. Some two-thirds of the prominent Hungarian writers and poets have come from Calvinist backgrounds or through the Calvinist colleges - far out of proportion to the Calvinists in the population as a whole.

The War of Independence was not a Protestant versus Catholic battle, but by that time Hungarian nationalism had absorbed Calvinist ideas including those of liberty and rebellion against tyranny; and the Habsburgs accused the Protestants of being behind the troubles. The slogan  Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, drawn from France, was much in evidence. "It was clear that the Revolution in Pest was not enough, but that arms were needed as well for the independence of the homeland. The soldiers were not mainly from Pest, but mostly Hungarians of the Great Plain. These people were mostly Calvinists. Debrecen became the centre of the War of Independence." (Gaál, 2007)  For the Protestant foot soldiers of the War of Independence, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity was interpreted and understood in biblical and, indeed, Calvinist terms. In his sermons, the Minister of the Great Church at the time, Mihály Könyves-Tóth (1809-1895), known as "Kossuth's priest", set the revolutionary slogan in that context. For his sermon of 26 March 1848, he took as his text verses from Galatians Chapter 5: "Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage... For we through the Spirit wait for the hope of righteousness by faith... For, brethren, ye have been called unto liberty; only use not liberty for an occasion to the flesh, but by love serve one another. For all the law is fulfilled in one word, even this; Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself" (Authorised Version, quoted in Gaál, 2007).

In the face of invasion of Hungary from the south and west, Kossuth and the government fled east (taking the Apostolic Crown of St Stephen with them) to Debrecen. When Kossuth entered the town on 7 January 1849, the gatekeeper revived the term that had been applied 250 years earlier to István Bocskai and applied it to Kossuth: "Moses of the Hungarians". The idea of Kossuth in the biblical image of the liberator was repeated often. Then, on 14 April 1849, in the Great Church of Debrecen, from the chair that we saw there, Lajos Kossuth proclaimed the Hungarian Declaration of Independence. It had been drafted by a joint session of the Upper and Lower Houses of the National Assembly meeting in the Debrecen Reformed College just behind the church.

Ultimately, the 1848 Revolution failed in Hungary, but only after the Austrian Emperor called in the help of 300,000 Russian troops. At one of the last battles of the war, the young revolutionary poet Sándor Petőfi disappeared, either killed in battle or taken prisoner with many others to Siberia. His body was never found. Mór Jokai wrote a thinly veiled autobiographical roman à clef, Political Fashions (1862) in which his friend (called "Pusztafi" in his novel) returns to Hungary, after a period of some years, dishevelled and disillusioned with both politics and poetry. It reflected the mood in Hungary after defeat in the War of Independence.

Martial law was imposed on Hungary. Hungary's constitution and separate institutions were suppressed and German became the language of government. Resistance went passive. When, however, Austria was defeated by Prussia in 1866, it was time to heal old wounds within the now-weakened Empire. Out of this came the 1867 Compromise that created the Dual Monarchy, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the theoretical equality of Hungary within it.

Lajos Kossuth went into exile when the Revolution failed. In the years immediately after the 1848 Revolution he was fêted in Britain and, to an even greater extent, in the United States. Daniel Webster (of the Dictionary) wrote a biography of Kossuth. Abraham Lincoln called him "the most worthy and distinguished representative of the cause of civil and religious liberty on the continent of Europe". In New York, "the Moses of the Hungarians" became "the Washington of Hungary".

Statue of Lajos Kossuth in front of the Great Church of Debrecen

A statue of Lajos Kossuth dominates the space (Kossuth Square) in front of the Great Church. In the green space (Calvin Square) behind the church there are two monuments: a statue of István Bocskai and a column remembering the Protestant preachers who were arrested during the Decade of Mourning, charged with high treason and sent to serve as galley slaves in the Mediterranean. It commemorates too the famous Dutch Admiral Michiel de Ruyter who freed them. For some it is a very personal monument: the name of one of Mária's ancestors is among the galley slaves listed on the monument.

The 20th century was cruel to Hungary. As part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and despite early covert approaches to the Entente Powers, Hungary's fortunes were tied to those of Austria. As a percentage of population more Hungarians were killed in the First World War than those of any of the other ethnic groups in the Empire. The village war memorials are crowded with the names of the dead. Then at the end of the war, with the Empire gone, the independent state of Hungary emerged with two-thirds of its territory, and more than half its population, awarded to neighbouring countries. 8 million ethnic Hungarians were left in Hungary. Some 3 million found themselves outside the new borders. The new Hungary was a kingdom without a king presided over by a regent who was an Admiral without a fleet. The new country was landlocked.

In the Second World War, unfortunately poised between Germany and the Soviet Union, Hungary again found itself on the losing side and not long afterwards under the domination of the Soviet Union. Gyula Illyés's haunting poem One Sentence on Tyranny was written in 1950 when Stalin was the man in the Kremlin.

Where there's tyranny,

There's tyranny

Not only in the gun barrel,

Not only in the prison cell...

And so it goes on, hauntingly tracing the subtle, corrupting effects of tyranny on everyday life. One Sentence on Tyranny was published for the first time in Hungary when freedom briefly flowered in the autumn of 1956. It was then not republished in Hungary until 1986.

Monument to the 1956 Hungarian Rising - Tarpa

In 1956, Hungary was the first European country to rebel against Communist tyranny. The rebellion, cruelly put down by invading Soviet forces, is commemorated in, among other places, a three-dimensional mural on the wall of the Tarpa town hall, behind the statue of that other rebel, Ferenc II Rákóczi. Some 2,500 Hungarians died in the 1956 rising, in addition to 700 Soviet troops. In the immediate aftermath, 26,000 Hungarians were arrested. Of them, some 350 were executed - including Imre Nagy, who had been Chairman of the Council of Ministers in the critical days from 24 October to 4 November 1956. 200,000 Hungarians fled the country. 23 October, now a national holiday in Hungary marks the 1956 rising. In 1989, the date was chosen to proclaim the Third Hungarian Republic - the post-Soviet republic. The Berlin Wall, remember, was still standing firm on 23 October 1989.

When European Communism came to an end in 1989, Hungary had, to a greater extent than most of the other Soviet satellites, already begun - more quietly this time - to loosen the Communist yoke. Across the border in Romania, where many ethnic Hungarians lived under the tyrant Ceauşescu, conditions were much worse. László Tőkés, a Minister of the Hungarian Reformed Church in Romania, "demonstrated the continuing militant tradition of Hungarian Calvinism, when his outspokenness and quarrel with local Communist party bosses as pastor in Timişoarsa (Temesvár) proved to be the catalyst for the revolution against Romania's last Communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu" (MacCulloch, 2003). Ceauşescu was executed on 25 December 1989. The transition in Hungary was far less violent.

Plaque on the wall of the Sarospatak Reformed College marking its return to the Reformed Church at the end of the Communist Era

In 2011 Hungary adopted a post-Communist Constitution, the last of the ex-Soviet satellites to do so, and amidst criticism from the liberal heartlands of the European Union. The Constitution begins:

God bless the Hungarians

NATIONAL AVOWAL

WE, THE MEMBERS OF THE HUNGARIAN NATION, at the beginning of the new millennium, with a sense of responsibility for every Hungarian, hereby proclaim the following:

We are proud that our king Saint Stephen built the Hungarian State on solid ground and made our country a part of Christian Europe one thousand years ago.

We are proud of our forebears who fought for the survival, freedom and independence of our country.

We are proud of the outstanding intellectual achievements of the Hungarian people. We are proud that our people has over the centuries defended Europe in a series of struggles and enriched Europe’s common values with its talent and diligence.

We recognise the role of Christianity in preserving nationhood. We value the various religious traditions of our country.

We promise to preserve the intellectual and spiritual unity of our nation torn apart in the storms of the last century...

The Prime Minister of Hungary when the 2011 Constitution was adopted was Viktor Orbán. Orbán came to national prominence when, as a young  student he gave a well-received speech at the ceremony marking the rehabilitation and reburial of Imre Nagy on 16 June 1989, "in which he was the first to publicly demand that the Russian invaders leave his country." (Ferenc Hörcher, Conservative or Revolutionary? Three aspects of the second Orbán Government (2010-2104), 2014.)  Supported by a scholarship from George Soros (that was then), Orbán studied in Oxford under Zbigniew Pełczyński, who, two decades earlier, had been my political philosophy tutor (and Bill Clinton's). He was Prime Minister from 1998 to 2002 and has been again since 2010. Orbán and several members of his government are active members of the Hungarian Reformed Church.

Tibor Fischer (Hungarian Tiger, 2014) argues that "Viktor Orbán is the most important Hungarian politician for a hundred and sixty years or so... but certainly since the generation of politicians that led the 1848 revolution"; and also notes that he is "the only politician in Hungary to command genuine affection and loyalty." Despite Orbán's enormous popularity at home, and to the bewilderment, if not anger, of many Hungarians, "if ever a man has been dumped on by the international press, it's Orbán" (Fischer, 2014). There have been "heated attacks against his policies in the European Parliament and the Western press in general" (Hörcher, 2014). In September 2016, the Foreign Minister of mighty Luxembourg even suggested that Hungary should be expelled from the European Union. Newsweek called Orbán "far right" in 2010 and the label has stuck. In much of Europe "right wing", let alone "far right", is shorthand for "outside the post-war political consensus". Very few of the many Hungarians who vote for Orbán see him that way.

*

There was once a saying in Debrecen that the end of the world will come when the Roman Pope stands inside this Calvinist town's Great Church. Well, in 1991, soon after the Communist yoke was thrown off, Pope John Paul II did come to Debrecen and he did enter the Great Church. He also laid a wreath at the foot of the galley slaves' pillar, a metal representation of which still lies there. And yet... the world goes on.

We bade a fond good bye to Dr. Gaál as dusk fell and walked back round to the long square in front of the church. There, under the gaze of Lajos Kossuth and rows of spectators on the tightly packed, makeshift stands, a game of 3x3 basketball was being played. Novi Sad versus Ljubljana. The night was warm. The lights were strong. The broadcast commentary, bouncing irrepressibly from language to language, was loud.

Farther along the square, where it was quieter, we sat down at a table on the pavement to dinner. The guitarist beside the restaurant played Hotel California, It's a Wonderful Life and Killing me Softly. I had last heard Killing me Softly played, on a similarly balmy evening, at the Café Restaurant du Parc des Bastions by the Reformation Monument in Geneva, not far from István Bocskai's statue there.

"Do you believe that there would be a Hungarian nation if there had been no Calvin?"

"I do not think so."

Gordon McKechnie

October 2016

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[1] See, for example, http://hargita.awardspace.com/taltos/taltosen.html

[2] This translation is taken from http://laszlokorossy.net/magyar/nemzetidal.html