012012 - Prešovská univerzita v Prešove

Baán István
Munkács or Ungvár about the former parish. All this might appear unusual,
but without better documents we can find no better alternative.
When did Ruthenians first move into Miskolc? In all likelihood they
arrived around the same time that their fellows in the faith settled in the
nearby villages of Görömböly, Hely_keresztúr, Sajópetri and Sajópálfalva.
That is, shortly after the Rákóczy uprising, when the landlord, who
supported their settlement, built churches for them. At least in part due
to the dominance of the Reformed church no such settlement occurred
in Miskolc. At best we can speak of some scattered settlers moving into
the town. Nevertheless there were enough settlers to form an average
size parish with its own priest. They did not have, nor could they have,
their own place of worship, because as Catholics the town would never
have granted them permission. Above all they would also have needed
the support of the Bishop of Eger, who reserved for himself even in the
case of the Uniate congregations, the right to approve the construction of
all churches. In the Eastern church no form of liturgical life is conceivable
without a church building. Consequently the congregation could not
function. Nevertheless the documents seem to indicate that at least in
the legal sense some form of unified parish appears to have operated in
Miskolc for several decades of the eighteenth century.
We will need to establish a working hypothesis in order to solve
the problem, and in order to elaborate this thesis we will also attempt to
draw from the documentation on the Greek merchants living in Miskolc
and their congregation. Our sources for this ecclesiastical history are the
registers of the local Orthodox parish, which were kept in Greek, 26 as
well as the already mentioned canonical visitations. Between 1726 and
1756 we find only a few scattered notes in the register, which indicates
that the community had no permanent priest, only a few regular clergy,
who stayed in Miskolc intermittently. Over the three decades the register
contains the names of only seven caloyer priests; and only one of them,
a Constantinos, worked at Miskolc for two and one-half years from 9
February 1736 to 8 November 1738. 27 The visitation records of 1746 mention
a priest called Leontinos, whose name is missing from the register. Based
on these records we can surmise that aside from these eight Orthodox
priests, there may have been other Greek clergy working temporarily in
the town to fulfill the spiritual needs of the Greek community, but their
names were not recorded in the register.
We can search for traces of the Uniate parish in the same period.
Since we can find no evidence that the Greeks in Miskolc ever united with
26 cf. above note 3. Henceforth abbreviated as MOEA.
27 MOEA, I, 380.
18