Zsolt Okolicsányi, a member of the Okolicsányi family from Okolicsna, donated his cherished family collection, which he had grown over the years, to our national archives with the help of our foundation. The old-timers would have said: his archives.
Zsolt Okolicsányi is more than a family researcher, he is a collector who pays tribute to the greatness of the ancients. For many decades, he has been working to maintain the family tradition and to form his wider kinship into a community. Today, the Okolicsányis live in 11 countries on three continents, and there may be about one hundred and eighty of them. During the almost 780-year history of the family, they owned land in thirty-one counties of Hungary. Members of the family were present at our great historical turning points, heroes of 1848, ispáns, vice-ispáns, county officials, and scholars have made the Okolicsányi name famous for centuries. They built the impressively beautiful Okolicsány Castle, which, despite its Baroque reconstruction, retains its Renaissance beauty. For centuries, they supported the neighboring Franciscan monastery, which served as their burial place and is perhaps the most significant sacral monument in Liptó.
Starting with 18th-century sources, Zsolt Okolicsányi’s collection primarily provides insight into the lives of the people of Okolicsányi in the 19th and 20th centuries. Numerous documents and photographs evoke the figure of István Okolicsányi, a legal scholar and lieutenant general of the 1848/1849 War of Independence, who was one of the first notaries in Hungary. Old documents bring to life Professor Dezső Okolicsányi-Kuthy, a legendary figure in Hungarian pulmonary medicine, or Dr. Pál Okolicsányi, who was imprisoned in the Recsk forced labor camp. The mosaic of letters and documents reveals the figure of Lieutenant Colonel László Okolicsányi, Zsolt Okolicsányi’s father, who served in a trench company (for a while as a commander) during World War II, and then faced the deprivation of rights that awaited members of historical families during the years of the party state. He was a lieutenant colonel, then an hourly-wage technical draftsman, a telegraph worker, and a construction engine mechanic, and he stood firm even in the most difficult historical moments.
Silver bromide-based photography has captured for us some frames from their lives: the happy hopes of their youth, their student years, their exercises, carnival fun, memories of budding loves, then the tragic moments of a country swept into war, frontline images, the events of the fifties, and later family reunions.
The Hungarian nobility was perhaps the most influential social stratum in our history, shaping our history in the forums of county decision-making, the military, the offices, and our culture. Compared to its significance, its history is not well known. Zsolt Okolicsányi’s noble gesture is another help for the research of the Hungarian nobility. The Foundation handed over the collection, which spans three archive boxes, to the Hungarian National Archives.
P. Zs.