The family Castle in Aiud

Of course no ancient noble house would be complete without some sort of fortification to attest to the accomplishments and the power of the residing noble family. In our case, it is the castle fortress in Romanian city of Aiud that is now a bit of a tourist attraction. The fortress would built back in the early 1300s to defend the lands against the invading Ottoman Turks. Also, the city of Aiud was originally part of the City of Décse, but is now known as Enyed by Hungarians and of course Aiud (pronounced "aye-OOD") by the Romanians.

It is truly a beautiful thing to observe, as it is pretty massive. It's smaller compared to the castles one might be familiar with in Ireland or Great Britain, but it is indeed large and beautiful.

Here are photos of the family castle:

Gone a little while... back with great news

I've been gone from blogging the past couple of months, but not without good reason.  I've spent a month in Europe, mostly Romania, Hungary and Austria.  This vacation gave me the opportunity to visit my family's ancestral lands in Transylvania (Hungarian: Erdély, German: Siebenbürgen). These lands are mostly villages, with the main one being gently nestled between the giant hills of the Carpathian mountains.  This village, Maros-Décse (Decea in Romanian) is the most significant.  These village is where my ancient ancestors lived and ruled and fought against the Turks.  It was their village.

Much of the knowledge that my family had about the Décsey family had been lost because of communism in Romania.  For some reason, the Décsey family did not flee the country as other noble families did to escape communism.  They chose to stay and, as a consequence, lost all of their last and much of their written history and documents.

Fortunately for me, the Hungarian communist government wasn't quite as destructive as the Romanian or Soviet ones were.  Documents and Peerage books were still readily available for those that knew where to look.  After having spent several years researching, I found several books chronicling the Décsey family, their lands and their exploits since the 14th century.  A wonderful source was a series of Peerage books from a Hungarian herald and scribe named Nagy Iván.  In this book, a monument to Count Balthasar Décsey was revealed to exist in the village of Maros-Décse (Decea Romania) inside the Hungarian Reformed Church.

Hoping that this writing was true (it was written over 150 years ago), my wife, my cousin, and I went to Decea to see for ourselves.  There we met a wonderful Priest of the Church and he was kind enough to speak to us about the family, the history of the village and the Church and of the monument to Count Balthasar Décsey.  We also rediscovered the small city of Aiud (Hungarian: Enyed), which contains a castle that once belonged to my family.  The whole city of Aiud in fact once belonged to my family.

The amount of history was simply breathtaking!  The village, the Church, the castle... built in the early 1300s -- these things were three times as old as the United States.  Also, the National Archives in Budapest has two large boxes full of documents and letters from my family dating back to medieval times, perhaps as early as 1000 AD.  The collection includes three Letters Patent (the documents from Kings proving nobility with rank and land) and other priceless documents.

I was very fortunate indeed to have done to proper research to come across all of these.  My family once thought all of these documents were long destroyed by communists.

I shall write more about what was discovered and my progress in reclaiming these properties.