Sírhely/Gravesite/Crying Place
Sírhely the Hungarian word for gravesite was new to me. Sír (sheer), I knew, means cry and hely (hay) is place. On a day trip from southern Hungary we visited two crying places, scenes of heartbreaking death and destruction that took place over 4 centuries apart.
Grave Posts
This is the address where my great-grandparents lived in Kolozsvár, Hungary when my grandpa was born. Today the city is called Cluj-Napoca, Romania.
Some of the buildings on the street are run-down but this looks better and it has some nice details. It has lace curtains in the windows and a bit of a garden in the back. I bet great-grandmother would have loved that.
Béla Édes, my grandfather, was 6 years old in 1897 when this map of Kolozsvár was published. His family lived on Nagy utca, shown by the red line drawn on the map.
You may notice the tracks along the street for the villamos (tram) that would have taken the family to the city center (now Unirii Square).
Kolozsvár villamos
Kolozsvár is located in a wide valley on the bank of the Szamos river. It was described as “a pleasant, clean-looking town, with wide streets diverging from the principal Platz, in which is the Gothic Cathedral of St. Micheal” 1. Szent Mihály templom, as it is known in Hungarian, is at #17 on the map. The imposing cathedral was begun by King Sigismund in 1401 and named for the Archangel Michael, the patron saint of the city. Béla’s Catholic family would have gone there for mass on Sundays, then probably home for a big Sunday meal.
Apatin, Serbia
Today I discovered another country that includes the birthplace of one of our ancestors. Apatin, Bacs-Bodrog, the birthplace of 2nd-great grandmother Julianna Vill in 1836, is now 30km south of the Hungarian border in Serbia. Prior to the 1920 Treaty of Trianon Apatin was in the Hungarian county (megye) of Bacs Bodrog.
1907 Hungarian postcard from Apatin. source; http://vukovisadunava.com
Looks like a lovely area on the Danube.
There is a website created by fellow genealogists that includes pictures, village map and a registry of Apatin descendants. And the website is in English!
Generations of the Édes family had lived and died in the Komárom region now just over the Slovakian border in northwest Hungary. Zsigmund Edes, born in Komárom in 1830 moved 350km south to the city of Vukovar in Croatia.
View of the Danube from Vukovar, 1917.
photo from Wikipedia Commons
There he married Julianna Vill who was born in Apatin, Bács-Bodrog, Hungary. They were married in the Church of St. Philip and Jacob in February 1858.
Why did they move so far away from their family homes? What do you think brought them to Vukovar?
Édes-Orbán Family 