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Lecture in Hungarian by Dr. Lehel Molnar PhD, Transilvanian historian and archivist

  • 1720 Arch Street Berkeley, CA 94709 United States (map)

“The lyrics of the Szekler anthem were written by György Csanády (1895–1952) from Székelyudvarhely, one year after the Treaty of Trianon, in 1921 and its music was composed by Kálmán Mihalik. Soon it became the often-prohibited and persecuted anthem for Szeklers. In Romania it was considered an irredentist song, and between 1946 and 1989 it was forbidden to sing both in Romania and in Hungary. In many places in the literature and lexicons it can be read that the Catholic Mihalik Kálmán graduated at the Catholic Piarist High School in Kolozsvár. It is true that in 1906 he enrolled in the Piarist High School, but he completed the last two years of his study at the Unitarian High School in Kolozsvár and graduated there at the end of the 1914–1915 school year, then began his medical University in the same city. Meanwhile he was enrolled as a soldier and fought on the front. After the Treaty of Trianon, when the Ferencz József University in Kolozsvár was evacuated to Szeged, Hungary, Mihalik and many of his colleagues continued their university studies there. He became a research physician, but four months after the presentation of the Szekler anthem, he died of typhus on September 6, 1922, at the age of 26.”

Lehel Molnár

Eseményszervező / Event organized by Éva Szabó