When Count József Cziráky and his wife, Ilona Andrássy, once in the year 1948, together with three chests containing silver and porcelain, also walled up the fourth chest containing the countess's correspondence, First World War diary sketches, fragments of her novel, poems and photographs in the hiding place created under the staircase of their castle in Dénesfa, they could not guess what their fate would be. They knew that they would soon be evicted from the castle, and they could only hope that the new people's power would soon end, and that they would still be able to see their hidden values and memories. It was not like that. The „old” count had been resting in the Dénesfa cemetery for more than ten years, and Countess Iloncsi, a strange resident of a Canadian old man's home, was also buried in foreign land four years ago, when on June 21, 1971, during the renovation work on the castle in Dénesfa, which had been converted into a mental institution, the workers working there found the crates in a block of brick under a staircase. Since most of the Cziráky legacy had previously been transferred to the Xántus János Museum in Győr, the finds found at that time were also directed here. The objects enriched the exhibitions of the museum, the documents continued to rest in the depths of a cupboard.
My colleague Péter Szabó, a local historian, directed the attention of the writer of these lines to the legacy that has not yet been stored, although carefully grouped according to the writers of the letters or their recipients. At first I was alarmed because most of the leaves were in a severely damaged condition at first glance. The more than two-decade-long time in the musty, mice-traveled hiding place did not pass without a trace over them. On the sheets of paper, molds drew out the maps of the deterioration, or the pulp fibers were dismantled, and a good part of the leaves were laced with a strange pattern, thus eliminating the letters that gave the news. „Deciphering” the letters seemed like a hopeless undertaking, and thus they continued to doze off in their hiding place for a year or two. In the depths of my consciousness, however, there was the urge to do what more useful I could do at my workplace than to first take stock of the legacy and then, if possible, bring to life the message of these old, famous, historical families. This is how I started to inventory the letters and prepare their content extract. In the meantime, several things were revealed: on the one hand, that the business is not hopeless, because the letters proved to be largely interpretable despite their sad state, and on the other hand, that a feeling of sympathy and spiritual and spiritual kinship developed between the owner of the letters and their processor. However, only the space was in common: the letters. Everything else is different: mostly the social milieu. Thirdly, I saw that these letters and notes are shocking lessons of a special human destiny, and last but not least, since some of the actors were also found among the shapers of the main course of Hungarian history in the narrower and wider kinship, it would not be useless for historical research to communicate these sources either.
