The tangled ownership relations are hindering the creation of the Pál Kinizsi Memorial Park planned for the site of the Battle of Kényérmeze in 1479, the Maszol.ro news portal wrote on Tuesday.

As the portal reminded, the Pontes Non-profit Foundation in Nagyvázsony prepared for the Social Involvement of Youth, the foundation stone of which was laid last October in Bokajalfalu, in the immediate vicinity of the former battlefield, on a plot of land containing the ruins of an Árpád-era church. The walls of the church - which today belong to the Reformed Church - were already standing during the battle fought 543 years ago.

After neither the local nor the county government exercised the right of pre-emption required for the sale of monuments, in May 2021 the Reformed Church sold the 2,600-square-meter plot on which the Árpád-era ruins and a cemetery stood to the Pontes Foundation. The foundation undertook the construction of the memorial park, its tourist promotion, and the restoration of the church tower, which was on the verge of collapse. However, the sales contract was challenged in court by a representative of the village council, who bought part of the plot from a local in 2019 and entered his ownership in the land register.

As Maszol.ro writes: that's when it became clear that the mayor's office had issued title deeds to the land surrounding the church ruins, which remained the property of the church even during the communist nationalization in 1948, but was not used by the church due to the lack of believers. A family built their new estate over the graves of the cemetery.

So the initiators did not even have the faintest idea that the area belonging to the Reformed Church was distributed in the 1990s by the local government without a legal basis - by taking advantage of the loopholes of the Land Act 18/1991 - without, of course, asking the church about it beforehand would be.

This actually meant that between 1948 and 1990, he declared the church property, which had never been nationalized, as an outlying area, and then distributed it to several local residents on property sheets. He did this without taking into account the "traces" of the inner area, i.e. the medieval tower, which is considered a monument, and the Reformed cemetery. The two new owners of the land registered for this use this method - one of them created his new property right above the tombstones of the cemetery.

"In such and similar cases, I usually draw attention to the fact that it is a typical South Transylvanian scattered story, when the ground is pulled out from under our feet"

- the portal quoted Gudor Kund Botondo, dean of the Reformed Diocese of Nagyenyedi. According to the deacon, the Bokajalfalu story is a typical case of the corruption process that took place around the issuance of land title deeds in the 1990s and even after 2000.

Lawyer Csaba Árpád Ladányi, president of the RMDSZ Fehér county organization, said: they will litigate for the restoration of the church's property rights. Both he and Bishop Gudor Kund Botond stressed: they will not give up the fight, and on October 13, the day of the Battle of the Bread Field, a commemoration will be held at the site.

In the Battle of Könyérmez, the armies of King Matthias, led by the Transylvanian voivode István Báthori, the southern captain Pál Kinizsi, and the Serbian voivode Vuk Brankovics, inflicted a decisive defeat on the Turkish army raiding Transylvania. The victory of the Hungarian armies deterred the expanding Ottoman Empire from invading Hungary for a long time.

MTI / maszol.ro

Front page image: The location of the Battle of Kényérmeze is precisely known | Photos: Basa Emese / Maszol.ro