Town center - Cegléd, Ungarn

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Statue of "the ​​founders of the town", group of a nun, a citizen and a peasant girl

Work of Györgyi Lantos, 1989

The history of Cegléd town was started with King Louis I of Hungary (also known as Louis the Great), when in 1358 he donated this royal estate to his mother Elizabeth of Poland (Elżbieta Łokietkówna), who passed it to the nuns of Óbuda. The nun character in the three-figure statue group of the Hungarian sculptor Györgyi Lantos in the Eötvös Square refers to this event. The statue is called "Town Founders" and it was inaugurated in 1989.

The area was already inhabited much earlier, in the Copper Age and then also in the Bronze Age. Later it was a temporary home of Iranian descent nomad tribes, first Scythians then in the Roman times nomadic Sarmatians. The emergence of a permanent settlement was begun in the age of the Árpád dynasty (the Arpads or Árpádians), immediately after the Hungarian conquest of the Carpathian Basin at the end of the 9th century (in Hungarian simply "Honfoglalás"). After the Mongol invasion in Hungary (between 1241-1242) the country accommodated escaping heathen kun people, who settled probably also around Cegléd.

The first written record of the settlement (as "Chegled") is from 1290, but this is not a clear evidence for this town in the Great Plain, because at that time there were more settlement with this name. The first credible source about the existence of Cegléd was a charter from 1358, which was about the mentioned donation. 10 years later Elizabeth of Poland gave the estate to the Clarissan nuns. They are the "Poor Clares", members of the Order of Saint Clare, which is the female branch of the men's Roman Catholic Franciscan Order, founded by Saint Clare of Assisi and Saint Francis of Assisi. From then the strict and rigorous Clarissa nuns were the feudal lords of Cegléd until 1782, except during the Ottoman rule. Among other things with their high taxes they practically push the citizens of Cegléd from the Roman Catholic fate towards the Reformation (Protestantism).

Memorial of the Dózsa Rebellion behind the Roman Catholic church

The statue was created by József Somogyi in 1972.

The Dózsa Rebellion in 1514 was evolved from a planned crusade against the Ottoman Empire. The military leader of this campaign would be György Dózsa, who then became the leader of the peasant army as well. Due to many reasons the crusade was cancelled, and the recruited serfs and peasants rebelled against their lords and the whole nobility. The rebellion could be suppressed only after four months, and it was followed by the retorsions. Many tens of thousands of peasants were tortured, although there were executions mostly just among the leaders of the revolt. It happened like this probably just because the nobles still needed the peasant labor force.

Calvinist (Reformed) Great Church of Cegléd

The building of the monumental Calvinist (Reformed) Great Church was begun by the neoclassical style plans of József Hild in 1835. The construction was fairly slow, and in addition the Hungarian Revolution and Independence War of 1848-1849 was also intervened. The Reformed pastor and the Catholic priest together went into battle against the oppressive Austrians, but after the fall of the revolution they were imprisoned so the building of the church delayed even further. Finally it was managed to finish in 1871, but due to lack of funds in a much simplier form: the bell-towers had tympanum endings with simple pyramidal spires, and on the place of the dome there was just a low-pitched pyramidal roof. The towers received their current hemispherical shape with the roof lanterns in the year of the Hungarian Millenium (1896) by the plans of Ernő Balázs. At that time a dome was also built, including a so-called tambour (also known as tholobate or drum), a circular or cylindrical wall pierced with windows in a circle, which carried the spherical cap-shaped dome roof. However, this version was still disproportionately low compared to the towers. The shapeful, well-proportioned hemispherical dome that can be seen today was built of copper plate covered ferro-concrete, designed by Figyes Benedek and it was completed in 1938.

Memorial of the "100-person delegation to Turin"

In 1877 Cegléd town invited Lajos Kossuth to be their National Assembly representative (parliamentarian). At that time the politician was lived in Turin (Torino) in Italy, hundred citizens of Cegléd town travelled to there the convince him. Although Lajos Kossuth had to reject the offer, later at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries his son Ferenc Kossuth was already the representative of the town in the Parliament. To commemorate the travel of the formerly sent hundred delegates their descendants founded an alliance (it was called in Hungarian "Turini Százas Küldöttség Múzeumbaráti Kör", approximately "The 100-person Turin Delegation Club of the Museum Friends"), then they established the current Kossuth Museum.