Priests and local communities

Our research group will also be represented at the conference entitled Priests in Local Communities, which will be held at the Department of Ethnography of ELTE.

János Ugrai reveals the fate of an elderly Reformed pastor from Northeastern Hungary: the 75-year-old pastor from Bánóc believed and even spread rumours during the cholera epidemic of 1831 that the pandemic was an artificially created disturbance and that therefore there was no need to maintain the precautions taken against it. The Church reacted with a swiftness that was unusual for the time, and the pastor lost his ministry and his livelihood for good. The lecture will seek to answer the question of what indirect traces can be used to infer the education and personality of a pastor who, apart from this misstep, left no written trace of his long career.