Church Slavonic Language in Hungarian Greek Catholic Records

If you have worked with Greek Catholic church records from northeastern Hungary, Slovakia, Carpathian Ruthenia or Romania, chances are you encountered this mysterious and seemingly illegible language: 

Kis Dobra Greek Catholic baptism records, 1850

As if deciphering old Latin handwriting was not difficult enough, right?!

This is Old Church Slavonic, created in the mid-9th century as the first Slavic literary language for translating the Bible and other ecclesiastical texts. It has never been a language of everyday communication. It has only been used by Orthodox and Greek Catholic priests in church ceremonies and documentation. This is an archaic language, incomprehensible for most native speakers of any modern Slavic language, who never took paleography classes.

Let alone the speakers of Latin script-based languages!

But it can make you feel better knowing that the Hungarian priests in the 19th century were, too, complaining about “not understanding the Slavic language”, which they were supposed to keep records in. The thing is that historically Greek Catholic church was mostly composed of Ruthenians and Romanians. In the 17-18th centuries, after the conflict with Protestants, many Hungarians joined the Greek Catholic church. In the 19th century Hungarian language started to be used, but after the defeat of the 1848 Hungarian Revolution, there was a return to Church Slavonic again. This process was not uniform, and varied not only between Munkács and Eperjes dioceses, but even from church to church within the same episcopate.

It explains the sudden changes in script in the mid-19th century records, sometimes just in the middle of a page, as in the picture below. Notice how the upper two rows are in Church Slavonic and the bottom two lines are in Hungarian. It looks like it is even the same person's handwriting. 

Kis Dobra Greek Catholic baptism records, 1850

It looks like the priests were given new instructions every now and then. I would also guess that they acted based on those instructions, as well as their own preferences and competences. Who can blame them?


If you are struggling with Church Slavonic records, here are some resources that you can use:

• Old Church Slavonic Online Dictionary
• Old Church Slavonic Numbers, Dates, and Months by Matthew Bialawa 
• Introduction to Church Slavonic video tutorial
• MACSE (Hungarian Society of Family History Research) page with tips on reading the old Slavic script (in Hungarian)

Textbooks, for a deep dive into Church Slavonic language:

• Handbook of Old church Slavonic
• An Introduction to Old Church Slavic by William R. Schmalstieg
• Old Church Slavonic: An Elementary Grammar by S. C. Gardiner  
• А.И. Изотов. Старославянский и церковнославянский языки: Грамматика, упражнения, тексты. (In Russian)
• А.А. Плетнева, А.Г. Кравецкий. Учебное руководство по церковнославянскому языкую. - М.: Издательство Древо Добра, 2001. (in Russian)

If you already know some basics of reading Cyrillic letters, it is a good idea to use a table like this one, while reading records. As the script was evolving, the form of letters changed over time. 

Variations of handwritten Church Slavonic alphabet

If you still have troubles with Old Church Slavonic records, please, contact me and I will be happy to assist you.

Death (and Love) in the Time of Cholera in 19th Century Hungary

While I was conducting research for a client in the Greek Catholic church records from Kis Dobra in present day Slovakia (formerly the Hungarian Kingdom), I stumbled upon the documentation of a cholera outbreak in the village.

It started in the beginning of 1873, with just several cases of death from cholera. By summer, practically all death records listed “cholera” as the cause of death.

The disease seems to have affected all ages equally, from babies to middle-aged and older people. Oftentimes, they were relatives, which is to be expected with an infectious disease. Here, two men of 34 y.o. and a 26 y.o. and a 3 y.o. girl from the same family became victims of the cholera outbreak. How devastating it must have been for the family!

The mortality rate was very high, considering that in a small community of less than a thousand people 2-3 people were dying every day for about a year. This is the total population, accounting the members of the Kis Dobra Greek Catholic parish from several neighboring villages, and not the amount of infected people.

According to the Wikipedia page on seven recorded cholera pandemics worldwide, two were severe in Hungary: within the second (1829–1837) and the fourth (1863–1875) pandemics. In Hungary specifically, cholera first appeared in 1831, and is estimated to result in about 100,000 deaths. The next pandemic was in 1872-1874, taking away 30,000 lives. Some Hungarian sources provide significantly higher estimates.

If this were not enough, literally at the same time, there were multiple cases of deaths caused by typhus.

Meanwhile, life went on in Kis Dobra. Children were born and couples got married. There are records of a death and a marriage that took place in the same family, just two months apart. A 73 y.o. man from the village called Bély dies of cholera in August 1873. A young man from the same house, probably his son or a grandson, gets married in October the same year. This was rather unusual to have a wedding in a mourning family so little time apart. But who knows what the circumstances were? A shotgun wedding? Another drama?

Why is this relevant? Details like these add dimension to a genealogy research. Reading historical records carefully is what creates a story, beyond just basic birth-marriage-death facts. As genealogists we can benefit from digging into every little detail from a record to get details about the life of people we are researching.

What else? Although this was an absolutely accidental find, it came in the time when a pandemic is causing a major panic and anxiety around the world. To me this is a reminder that pandemics have always been part of human history. Our ancestors have been dealing with a multitude of devastating diseases, on top of already relatively short (by modern standards) lifespans. We are the lucky descendants of survivors. However sad the story is, this is a pacifying thought about human resilience.