My essay offers a reading of János Térey’s Jeremiás avagy az Isten hidege that focuses on the play’s embeddedness in the cultural memory of Debrecen, a city of undeniable significance in Hungarian literary history. I investigate the play’s strategies to re-interpret the topoi of other Debrecen-related texts, including seventeenth-century Calvinist sermons, the poems of Endre Ady or contemporary pop songs. Thus, I interpret the ways Térey’s rhetoric undermines the stability of dichotomies that traditionally characterise the literary representations of the city, such as the opposition between nature and urban space or the clash of intellectual openness and provincial isolation. The paper also analyses Biblical and religious allusions in order to reveal the various links between Prophet Jeremiah and Térey’s fictional, hypermodern figure of Jeremiás, a disillusioned politician from Debrecen.

My essay offers a reading of János Térey’s Jeremiás avagy az Isten hidege that focuses on the play’s embeddedness in the cultural memory of Debrecen, a city of undeniable significance in Hungarian literary history. I investigate the play’s strategies to re-interpret the topoi of other Debrecen-related texts, including seventeenth-century Calvinist sermons, the poems of Endre Ady or contemporary pop songs. Thus, I interpret the ways Térey’s rhetoric undermines the stability of dichotomies that traditionally characterise the literary representations of the city, such as the opposition between nature and urban space or the clash of intellectual openness and provincial isolation. The paper also analyses Biblical and religious allusions in order to reveal the various links between Prophet Jeremiah and Térey’s fictional, hypermodern figure of Jeremiás, a disillusioned politician from Debrecen.