A History of Central Eastern Europe

Located about 12 miles northeast of
SÁTORALJAÚJHELY, TORONYA refers to a
tower and this was the name of the village in
1200. NAGY- means large while KIS- means
small; almost 2 centuries later it was
necessary to add these prefixes as a second
village came to be by 1392. The first
recording of the name NAGY-TORONYA dates
to 1441 but it must have been used since
1392. In 1566 the town was destroyed by
advancing Ottoman armies. The first
mention of a winery here is found in a
census of 1715 which relates the devastation
wrought by the plague – 50 of the 62 houses
here were abandoned. The ensuing repopulation by Greek Catholic Slovaks and Ruthenians
coincided with the building of a health spa centered around NAGY-TORONYA’s mineral spring.
During this same period mining operations
began so as to exploit the area’s coal.
A 1796 description states that the village
residents are Catholic and Calvin while a
later one (1851) describes NAGY-TORONYA
and KIS-TORONYA as Hungarian-Russian
villages with a combined population of
930. Of that number 36% were Greek
Catholics (332), 34% Calvinists (314),
26% Roman Catholics (246), and <1% each
of Jewish (30) and evang (8). The numbers
remained steady as the 1877 Dvorzsák
Gazeteer reveals: NAGY-TORONYA’S population is 594 and of that 43% were görög katholikus
(257, Munkács), 29% református (174, Tiszáninnen), 25% római katholikus (147,
Sátoraljaújhely) and <1% were izraelita (11, Sátoraljaújhely) and ágostai (5). The number
of
each and the ‘mother’ church, if known, is in parenthesis. An Augustinian monastery with a
Romanesque style church was built in the 13th century. This was taken over by the Calvinist
Church in the 16th century and remodeled during the Rennaissance and again in 1834 in the
Empire style. A Greek Catholic Church was built in the Neoclassical style during the 19th
century.
The villages belonged to noble’s estates or the
royal demesne. In 1321 the MIČBÁNOVCOV family
held the estate; 1380 had MIKULÁŠ PERÉNYI; in
1479 it was the SEMSEY family; 1481 - the
CZÉKEYEKS; 1511 – the BUTTKAYAKS; from the
1690s until 1711 the owner was FERENC II
RÁKÓCZI, the ASPERMONT family held the lands in
the 17 th & 18 th centuries. In the 19 th century it
became the SZÉCHY family estate in the person of
GRÓF SZÉCHENYI ISTVÁN (COUNT STEPHEN
SZÉCHENYI, 1791 - 1860) a great statesman.
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