The pine cone is now falling

Fifty writers about József Nyirő and his unparalleled works - a hundred years ago. Who was Nyirő, what and about what and how did he write? - we could ask the question on behalf of the authors of the volume. Antal Szerb, Lajos Áprily, Sándor Reményik, Károly Molter, Sándor Makkai, Béla Jancsó, László Szabédi, László Németh, Aladár Schöpflin, Jenő Dsida, János Kemény, Nándor Várkonyi and many others. According to Géza Féja, Nyirő's writings brought a different flavor of the Hungarian world creation. We could not say whether he was new or old, East or West, this or that, we had to say: Hungarian. We could compare him to Saint Francis, who now talks with flowers and mountains, but also to the Hunnic Igriz, who returns to Asia on the paths of rivers. A Catholic, for whom salvation is the true blood, but also a Hungarian gangrenous from terrible rebellions. The writings not published in the volume provide a panoramic view of Nyirő's oeuvre, and at the same time provide an image of the writer's significance, memorable figures, and impressive oeuvre, which politics tried to neglect for decades in both Romania and communist Hungary. Yet Nyirő's departure was also unusual, as revealed in Endre Medvigy's very thorough foreword: He could choose between a teaching career, a military officer, and a priest. He struggled with doubts, but at the urging of his deeply religious mother, he nevertheless decided in favor of the latter. In 1907, he began his theological and philosophical studies in Gyulafehérvár, at the Roman Catholic Episcopal Priest Training Institute. The young theologian, who was eminent throughout, was still being ordained, and therefore his diocese sent him to Vienna to complete his studies. He spent two semesters of the 1911-1912 academic year in the capital of the monarchy at the Faculty of Theology of the Imperial and Royal University. The Pazmaneum, founded by Péter Pázmány, was his scientific workshop and home. In 1912, he defended his dissertation in Latin here, and later that same year, on July 14, 1912, he was ordained a priest by Bishop Ágoston Fischer Colbrie of Košice. He celebrated his first mass in his mother's native village, in the Árpád-era church of Csíkmenaság, in front of the Renaissance winged altar. His earliest attempts at prose appeared in 1909 and 1910 in Győr, in the journal of the women's Congregations of Mary, Nagyasszonyunk. The special volume is a time travel to Transylvania, Marosvécs and Cluj-Napoca between the two world wars, and through Nyirő's works to the mountains, Székelyland and the Carpathians.