Thursday, July 26, 2007

Kolozsvár


Szia Friends and Members of FUCSJ,

We have spent a day in Kolozsvár. (This is the Hungarian name; in Romanian it is Cluj-Napoca.) We had a wonderful tour of the Unitarian High School. The recent history of the high school parallels that of the Transylvanian Unitarian church. It was built in 1901. The building was confiscated by the government during the Communist era. It was not returned to the Unitarian church until around 1996. Since then they have had access to only one half of the building. A public school uses the other half.

We toured the Unitarian Church in Kolozsvár which also contains the rock that Ferenc Dávid (Francis David) stood upon to preach the unity of God in 1568. At that point Unitarianism became the state religion of Hungary. The church itself is very large and with a simple bright interior. In contrast to the simple designs, there were embroidered cloths used to border the front pews and the alter in the front of the church. The cloths were white and the embroidery was red with a Hungarian motif. It was a stunning effect.

Today, Thursday the 26, we left Kolozsvár on our bus to travel to our partner church village of Homoródszentmárton. On our way we stopped in Torda at the church where the Diet of Torda was held. This afternoon we arrived at the village, where we received a very warm welcome from our hosts. Tomorrow we will begin our labyrinth project and graveyard preservation. We have found that we will need to move a great deal of earth to flatten the labyrinth site. We have found several headstones that have sunken into the ground so far that only a couple of inches remain above the ground. We will need to dig very deep to retrieve these heavy pieces of stone.

We are looking forward to a fantastic experience here in our village. Thank you for your thoughts and prayers. We feel them here.

Szia,

Monty

1 comment:

Bruce Halen said...

Is this cool or what! The names Kolozsvar and Francis David have meaning to me now after hearing about them at Leadership School last week. I now understand why ya'll were so excited to go to Transylvania.

It's a good thing you got there about six centuries late to meet Vlad the Impaler!

Have fun,

Bruce