“Him being cast into fire not to be vain” – the trials of pastor Barna Horkay during the soviet era

Abstract

Abstract. Barna Horkay was born in 1908 in Kistárkány into a family of Reformed pastors. He graduated from the Sárospatak Theological Academy in 1931. In 1935, the Nagyszőlős congregation elected him as its pastor. The following year, he joined the internal mission activities of the Eastern Friends Circle and took an active role in it. He was one of the Transcarpathian pastors who were sentenced to several years of camp imprisonment by the anti-church Soviet regime. He was able to return home in 1955 and serve again, for many years in several congregations at the same time due to the increasingly serious shortage of pastors. He took the cause of the replacement of pastors in Transcarpathia to heart. He died in Sárospatak in 2003 at the age of ninety-five.