300 years ago, in 1722, the first Hungarian-language Calvinist church service (in the framework of the so-called Peregrinatio Hungarica) was held in Utrecht, and on this occasion, a commemoration of thanksgiving was held in the city's Gothic cathedral on 19 November 2022, organised by the Hungarian Reformed Congregations of the Netherlands. After the opening devotion, the participants were welcomed by Ambassador András Kocsis, who recalled that Utrecht, as a university town, had welcomed Protestant travellers from Hungary and Transylvania, including János Csere Apáczai, for centuries. The importance of Hungarian-Dutch church relations is shown by the fact that in the 1960s the so-called "reverse peregrination" took place: when the communist dictatorship did not allow scholarship holders to leave the country, theologians from the Netherlands came to Debrecen and Kolozsvár to study for two years. Balázs Ódor, Head of the Transcarpathian and Foreign Affairs Department of the Synodal Office of the Reformed Church of Hungary, and Dr. Béla Levente Baráth, Rector of the Reformed Theological University of Debrecen also greeted the guests on the occasion of this important ecclesiastical event. The ceremony also included the presentation of the Bethlen Gábor Memorial Plaque to Pastor Dr. G. Henk van der Graaf, in recognition of his dedicated work in preserving the relationship between the Dutch and Hungarian church communities.
At the commemoration, the participants had the occasion to listen to a series of lectures, interspersed with personal memories, on the importance of preaching in the mother tongue and the development of Hungarian relations in Utrecht. The celebration was enlivened by the music of the Hague Hungarian Choir as well as by the Solo Quartet.
