Blog Note: As always, to see more of the trip pictures, please check out the photo album on my Facebook page, at this link.
Today was a remarkable day. It will be probably the most Unitarian-focused day of the entire trip in terms of history and sight-seeing. In a nutshell, we follow the birth, life and death of David Ferenc (Francis David) all in one day.
Woke up on Monday and went to breakfast on the lower level of the Hotel Transilvania in the small eating area. As I am learning later on, these hotels have eating areas, but most of them are not “restaurants” in the same way we understand them in the US. Here they mostly only cater to the hotel guests and are not open to the public. And the meal comes with the cost of the room.
After breakfast we packed our bags went to visit the Headquarters of the Unitarian Church for all of Romania and Hungary. In the old days before the wars, before Hungary was divided, Kolozsvar was the Unitarian Headquarters for all of Hungary, as well as the school and the primary church. It is still so today, except it is now located in the country of Romania, and has to understand itself as going across international borders.
UNITARIAN CHURCH HEADQUARTERS
Jobbágy Júlia, the sixth-year seminary student we met yesterday, met us in the morning at our hotel and walked us the 2-3 blocks around the corner to the Unitarian Church Headquarters. This place is important – a little like 25 Beacon Street was, and 24 Farnsworth is, to us Unitarian Universalists in the United States. This is the “Mecca” of Romanian and Hungarian Unitarians.
Though the headquarters have been in Kolozsvar for centuries, this building itself was built only in about 1901 (if I remember correctly). But it houses three entities: the administrative and ecclesiastical headquarters of Unitarians in Romania and Hungary; the Unitarian Seminary; and the Unitarian (boarding) school for grade school and high school age kids.
As I mentioned earlier, the Unitarians in Romania have suffered over the centuries. For about 150 years in the 16th and 17th centuries under Catholic rule they were not allowed to build any new churches or evolve their theology (part of the reason David Ferenc was imprisoned was because his theology kept evolving). And again under communism they suffered. The communists came to power just after World War II, and in 1948 they took away the building that housed the Unitarian Church headquarters. I don’t recall what they used it for, but it no longer belonged to the Unitarians, and with no compensation. In addition, the Unitarians were not allowed to build any new churches, and many times they were not allowed to meet in the churches they did have. So they met in homes or barns or farmer’s fields. After the fall of communism in 1989-1990, they did finally get this building back.
Júlia took us into the entrance hall and gave us a narrative history of the place and then took us upstairs to the Bishop’s office and though we did not met the Bishop himself, we met his secretary, Maria. Maria took us into the room attached to the office, which was the room where the consistory meets. Since we do not have a bishop or consistory in the US, I was not sure what that was – but learned it is the ecclesiastical governing body of Unitarianism in Hungary and Romania. So it was slightly like (though different) our UUA President and Board meeting.
There were paintings of all the former Bishops and lay presidents on the walls. The sense of history and gravitas was palpable. It reminded me of when I first transferred to Meadville/Lombard seminary in Chicago, which is one of our two remaining Unitarian Universalist seminaries. And this was the Meadville/Lombard where it had been for a century, housed in an old stone building just across from the University of Chicago campus. The building was built at least around 1920, if not earlier, but it was a beautiful old building with a stone exterior and a large central staircase made of marble with carved wooden handrails. The seminary in Kolozsvar, though perhaps not quite as beautiful as Meadville/Lombard, gave me that same sense of grounding, of presence, of solidity, and of history, a sense that “we’ve been here a long time,” and “we have generations of good work resounding from these walls.”
FARKAS SANDOR ALEXANDER
Maria described some of the men in the paintings hung around the room, and focused in particular on one minor government worker, Farkas Sandor Alexander (Alexander Farkas). He had been a low level bureaucrat (who could not ascend in almost any realm because he was a Unitarian) who had multiple talents. He loved the theater and the arts, and he loved to write. At some point in first half of the 1800s, he also became a lay president of the Unitarian Church.
Maria told us that in 1831 Farkas traveled to the United States to observe how the new country was managing under the grand experiment in democracy – and also discovered there a different kind of Unitarianism – and then in 1834 published a book of his travels after returning, which he titled Utazas Eszak Amerikaban (translated as Journey in North America). After the book was published, a book that described democracy and equality and humane treatment of prisoners and a “rule of law” legal system, he became a very famous man in the feudal state of Hungary…for about a year. By the end of 1835 the authorities placed his book on the list of forbidden books and all copies were seized and confiscated.
Maria showed us a copy of the book she had, and then showed us a copy in English. I got so excited and right away asked if any of the English translations were for sale, and she said yes! It was only $10 and I immediately asked for one, and she got one for me and two others on the trip. It’s a beautifully and simply designed hardcover bound book, and I’ve been reading it as I am able on the trip, and it is fascinating. It is such a treasure to have discovered and explore how a Hungarian Unitarian saw our early 19th Century United States and 19th Century Unitarianism. I must admit, I feel some kinship with him. Though I am not a one bit of a nobleman, and am not at all famous for my writings, I am a bit like him in reverse: a North American Unitarian visiting 21st Century Transylvania and 21st Century Unitarians, and making my observations. This is such a cool book, and I am SO glad it was available for sale.
TRANSYLVANIAN WOMEN IN MINISTRY
It was also fascinating to see Maria and Júlia side-by-side in that Consistory room. Maria entered the Unitarian seminary in Kolozsvar in 1990, as one of two women to enter the seminary immediately after the fall of Communism. She entered, she said, as a great feminist, determined to prove that women were just as capable in ministry as men. And she was faced with a certain amount of discrimination, and certainly she faced those who may have supported her, but who also questioned whether she would ever get placed into a church by the Bishop. Even her own parents did not feel that seminary was a place for a woman.
And then right next to her sat Júlia, a young woman born in early 1990, just after the fall of Communism, and who is going to graduate this June 2015. At 25 years old, she says the seminary, and the Romanian/Hungarian Unitarian ministry in general, is made up of about 25% women ministers. And she says she has felt no discrimination whatsoever.
These two women, Maria and Júlia, represent a progressive 25-year arc of ministry in Romania. It is striking and notable to me partly because of the feminist struggles of my own mother when she was in seminary in the United states in the mid-1980s. Since American women had been in seminary for 20 years by that time, my mother probably had a better time than the women in Romania, but there were still things like no female seminary professors, little or no textbooks written by women, and no seminary courses in feminist perspectives. So to the extent that I can, I appreciate the progressive arc represented by Maria and Júlia.
We saw a few other things at the Unitarian Headquarters, including a larger meeting room next to the Consistory, wall hangings in the hallway of century-old seminary graduating classes and commemorative signs on the stairway walls. I finally also saw the arches outside (Norby had told us about them on Sunday) that arch over the alley between the Unitarian Church and the seminary. Norby said that a century or two ago it was discovered that the church was leaning and was likely to fall down, when they called in an architect who implemented some support structures to the building itself, and also added the arches attached to the seminary in order to help stabilize the church from the outside. Norby said he always likes to imagine how the church is literally “leaning on” the seminary for support.
Finally Júlia took us back to our hotel where we said our goodbyes. She had been a very informative, patient, and gracious guide. She said she might visit the United States someday, so if she does I hope she has the time to come to visit us in Minnesota!
Tensile Strands 