The Reformed College (Kollégium)

For more than four and a half centuries the life of the city was entwined with the Reformation, so the Reformed College, which was also called the ‘school of the nation’, had a distinguished role in the city’s history. The College was already active by 1538, its intellectual foundations laid by professors who studied in the universities of the Netherlands, Germany and England.

The College was run by the municipality. The head of the student body or ‘coetus’ was the ‘senior’ who directed and supervised the life of the young people. The rector-professor was in charge of directing the studies.

The building of the Old College burnt down in 1564 but was soon rebuilt, because not long afterwards it was hosting teachers and students again. From 1657 onwards the life of the students was regulated by school rules. This meant that they woke up at three in the morning and went to bed at nine in the evening, and in between they studied, cooked or, in winter time, tried to keep warm.

The College combined the lower, middle and higher levels of education. Until 1848 only a few masters worked in the College. They taught only at an advanced level and their task was to direct the spiritual and mental development of the students. At lower levels teaching was done by the best of the academic students. The College with its 200 ‘partikulas’ (the branches of the parent school) created an intellectual centre where, for centuries, the country’s brightest minds gathered. The system was designed to search for the best talents – and took care of them too. The parent school supplied the town’s reformed and congregational schools with teachers, rectors, priests, curricula, text-books and school equipment. The most talented students of the ‘partikulas’ were chosen and sent to the College. A number of poor but talented students were given the opportunity to study, to board and have meals in the College, in return for cleaning, carrying dinner-cans and doing other services. Every year several hundred, sometimes 500-600 poor students lived in the Alma Mater.

During the ‘legation’ at Christmas, Easter and Whitsun, a graduate preached and was escorted by a young student who would talk to the members of the congregation, who gave presents to the students and presented their donations to the College. Donations in kind were collected by the students after harvests and grape pressing.

The College had always been supported by the town but 80 percent of the expenses was provided by the congregations. When Maria Theresa forbid the town and the congregations to support the College, funds materialised, and foreign churches also supported the establishment. Among its walls students were not only educated to become teachers or priests - the College provided an education with which the graduates were able to continue their studies; they could become town-clerks, lawyers, engineers, doctors or junior officials. It was here that the city’s governing and business class were educated. From the time of reformation the students spent 2-3 years in the universities of Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands, or England and when they returned home they disseminated the knowledge they had acquired.

Through the Reformed College Debrecen gave talented and ‘educated people’ to the country. This is why it became the ‘school of the nation’ and Debrecen, to use the words of Gál Huszár, became the “lighting lantern of Hungary and Transylvania”.

Geography, history, medical science and natural sciences were at the core of the curriculum in Hungary. Until the beginning of the 19th century the language of education was Latin, which enabled contact with the scientific life of Europe. Hungarian was the language of worship in the College and of the lower level schools of the ‘partikulas’. The 18th century is considered to be the golden age of the College, the most famous academic professors worked here during this period. But this was also the time when the Hapsburg dynasty took measures that did not favour the College. The student government was gradually placed under professorial supervision and Maria Theresa made it harder for students to study abroad.

In 1739 the church choir singing was taken to a high level by the formation of the College Kantus and between 1790 and 1815 the students’ engraving society enriched the school literature with maps and other visual teaching aids.
By 1901 the renovation of the building became absolutely necessary and Mihály Pécsi, who was a College graduate, designed the reconstruction of the south wing. The old building was destroyed by fire in 1802 during the Whitsun break. The senior, and some students who were staying in the College during the holiday, selflessly tried to save the library, the archive, the collection of physics apparatus and the classrooms. In the undamaged rooms and classrooms and in the teachers’ and students’ converted lodgings teaching started in September.

Between 1803 and 1816 the new College was built according to the plans of Mihály Pécsi. The building of the Old College had been pulled down and between 1870 and 1874 the two buildings were joined following plans by Lajos Vasél. This is how the building acquired its irregular quadrangular shape.

Forrás: www.debrecen.hu