Exile, imprisonment, torture and dispossession have been characteristic of all generations of the family at all times. Two brothers of the Mikes family found even their place in Hungarian folk romance literature after they had kidnapped the daughter of a well-known (protestant) family in 1634; their properties were subsequently confiscated by the government. ("Özvegy és leánya" "The widow and her daughter" from Zsigmond Kemény)

Count Benedek Mikes (the great great grand father of Gregor and Alexander Roy Chowdhury de Ulpur) was sentenced to death when he and his brother deployed an army against the Habsburg monarchy in 1848/49; he fled the country and returned to Zabola twelve years later via Geneva, Paris and Bulgaria.
His brother, Count Kelemen Mikes, who had become a Hussar colonel died at the age of 29, hit by the first cannon ball fired by the Russian army in 1849. He became a martyr to the Székler resistance movement.

A few of them were also involved in cultural issues such as Kelemen Mikes. Born in Zabola/Transylvania in 1690 he became freedom fighter against Habsburg, escaped to Poland, France and at least Turkey. He became famous after writing "Letters from Turkey" in Rodosto where he lived in exile with the Transylvanian Prince Rákoczi until 1761. With his letters from Rodosto, Kelemen Mikes laid the foundations of the Hungarian prosaic literature, and he is regarded as the first Hungarian prosaic author. A plaque was erected on the lot on which the house where he was born once stood, and in the park of Zágon Manor stand the two old oak trees, which, people say, he planted. The two statues of Rákoczi and Mikes can still be found in Rodosto.