Szatmárcseke

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Szatmárcseke
Szatmárcseke coat of arms
Szatmárcseke (Hungary)
Szatmárcseke
Szatmárcseke
Basic data
State : Hungary
Region : Northern Great Plain
County : Szabolcs-Szatmár-Bereg
Small area until December 31, 2012 : Fehérgyarmat
District since 1.1.2013 : Fehérgyarmat
Coordinates : 48 ° 5 '  N , 22 ° 38'  E Coordinates: 48 ° 5 '9 "  N , 22 ° 37' 52"  E
Area : 36.31  km²
Residents : 1,553 (2015)
Population density : 43 inhabitants per km²
Telephone code : (+36) 44
Postal code : 4945
Structure and administration
Community type : local community
Structure : Fehérgyarmat, Kisgyarmat
Mayor : Csoma Zoltan
Postal address : Petőfi u. 1.
4945 Szatmárcseke
Website :

Szatmárcseke , until 1907 Cseke , is a municipality ( Hungarian község ) in the northeast of Hungary in the Fehérgyarmat district , which belongs to the Szabolcs-Szatmár-Bereg county . The municipality with 1553 inhabitants (January 2015) is located near the Ukrainian border. A sign of the inhabitants who became Calvinist in the 16th century is the historically significant and unique in Hungary cemetery with boat-shaped wooden grave steles. For Hungarians, Szatmárcseke is best known as the place where Ferenc Kölcsey wrote the Hungarian national anthem in 1823 .

Location and traffic

Szatmárcseke is located in the Northern Great Plain at an altitude of 110 to 115 meters on the left, southern bank of the Tisza , which forms the border with Ukraine here. The Tisza flows in an arc to the north and west around the town in a westerly direction, while the Ukrainian border runs north. Apart from a wooded strip along the Tisza with pastures and scattered forest islands, the area consists of small parceled fields, on which above all maize and sunflowers thrive, meadows for cattle breeding and plantations with apple and plum trees. Several watercourses meander through the fields: the Túr Canal to the east of the village, the Öreg-Túr stream a few kilometers to the southeast and the Tökös Canal to the south. In the traditionally agricultural region, there is a lack of craft and industrial businesses. Unemployment is particularly high compared to the national average. According to information from 2011, the number of employees is only 26.4 percent. The training qualification is also low. The state farms and production cooperatives that existed during the socialist era were dissolved after the fall of the Wall in 1990. Families usually need several sources of income for their livelihood in the peripheral region.

The next town, Fehérgyarmat, is 17 kilometers southwest on the main road 491, which leads to the border town of Tiszabecs across from the small Ukrainian town of Wylok . A side road branches off from 491 in Penyige and leads via Túristvándi (3 kilometers south) to Szatmárcseke. A little further away in the east is the neighboring municipality of Kölcse. The closest place to the west is Nagyar (7 kilometers). Csaroda with a Romanesque church, the most important architectural monument of this region, follows further north-east via the village of Tarpa . Szatmárcseke can be reached by local buses, the nearest train stations are in Fehérgyarmat and Vásárosnamény .

history

Ferenc Kölcsey Statue and Museum

Until the end of the 12th century, the area was hardly populated and densely covered with oak, ash and elm forests. The place name appears for the first time in 1181 in a document that speaks of the founder of a settlement, a lumberjack named Cseke. The place kept the name Cseke until 1907, when it got the distinctive addition Szatmár-. Cseke is also included in the Hungarian place name Lácacséke and so is the Slovak village of Čaka in Hungarian.

The place soon came into the possession of the noble family Szentemágócs, who have been mentioned by name in documents since the beginning of the 13th century. The Kölcsei and Kende families were two lineages of this sex who owned most of the lands until the end of World War II . Only at the beginning of the 16th century did the place become the property of the Báthori and Perényi families for a while. During the domination of the Ottoman Empire over Hungary from 1526 to 1686, Szatmárcseke was spared from devastation, so that some nobles moved here by 1660 and their number increased in the following centuries. After the Battle of Mohács in 1526, which marked the beginning of the Ottoman conquests, the Protestant faith of Calvinism spread across Hungary; most of the Magyars converted to Calvin's Reformed Church , while the majority of the Slavs in Hungary remained Roman Catholic . At the end of the 16th century, under Rudolf II , the Counter-Reformation followed, starting from Vienna , which spread Catholicism again. The inhabitants of Cseke, who became Calvinist in the 16th century, remained true to their faith.

According to a source from 1509, around 300 people lived in the village that year. With a count of 1660 one registered 108 households, which are converted to about 504 inhabitants. After the crackdown of the Rákóczi uprising against the Habsburgs from 1703 to 1711 , the number of inhabitants fell significantly; in 1720 there were still 20 serf and 4 indigenous families. At the beginning of the 18th century, all of Hungary was underpopulated by European standards and large parts of the Hungarian lowlands were not cultivated. The Hungarian king tried to counter this by recruiting immigrants. In 1785 the population had risen to 806. The land area belonging to the village was around 64 square kilometers, twice as large as it is today. In 1795 some Catholic families were settled with the Calvinist residents. At the end of the 19th century, the village had the largest number of inhabitants up to that point in 2003. This number then decreased due to the emigration of impoverished farm workers to the United States and other countries outside Austria-Hungary , especially at the beginning of the 20th century - around 300 people from Szatmárcseke - and through the two world wars. In 1960 the place had grown to 2165 inhabitants. Rural exodus to the big cities reduced the population to 1,553 in 2015.

Townscape

Catholic Church on the main street

The Szatmárcseke municipality includes 49 small settlements and farmsteads (in 2011), which are scattered along the borders with Ukraine and Romania. With its 1553 inhabitants (2015), Szatmárcseke is one of the largest municipalities in the region.

The main street of the village is Kölcsey ulitza , which runs from west to east . The town hall ( Polgármesteri hivatal ) is located in the middle at the confluence of the road coming from Túristvándi from the south . The street is named after and the most important personality of Szatmárcseke is the poet, member of parliament and notary Ferenc Kölcsey (1790–1838). He settled in the village in 1815 and lived here until his death. On January 22nd, 1823 he wrote the Hungarian national anthem . Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, this day has been the day of Hungarian culture in honor of the national homeland poet Kölcsey . Kölcsey's house was demolished in 1889 because it was in disrepair. The house built in its place gave way to a new cultural center in 1960, in which two rooms are now set up as the Ferenc Kölcsey Memorial Museum. This is located on the main street about 200 meters west of the town hall. The bronze sculpture of the poet in front of the building was erected in 1973, on the 150th anniversary of the Hungarian national anthem.

There is an older Calvinist church on Kölcsey ulitza ( Református templom , yellow, with a pointed roof over the bell tower), which dates back to the beginning of the Reformation, and a Roman Catholic church ( Szentháromság templom , red, with onion dome) , built in 1841 .

Several private pensions scattered across the town (as of 2014: two larger and six small pensions) offer accommodation in the season from May to September. This tourist development began after the turn of the millennium. It appeals to Hungarian tourists who want to hike or go boating on the Tisza.

Calvinist cemetery

Calvinist cemetery with boat-shaped grave steles, Ferenc Kölcsey's tomb in the back left.
New black lacquered grave steles

The Calvinist cemetery, which has been a listed building since 1979, is surrounded by meadows on the northern outskirts not far from the town hall. In the rear (northern) part of the cemetery is the classicist tomb of Ferenc Kölcsey in the shape of a rotunda made of marble , which consists of six columns, which carry a wreath interrupted at the front.

The place of worship for Kölcsey is the only stone tomb in the cemetery, the cultural and historical significance of which lies in the boat-shaped wooden grave stelae. They are a relic of the Hungarian Protestant folk culture and in this number are unique in Hungary. The approximately 600 steles are made of gray-black weathered oak and protrude 1.5 to 2 meters high vertically or slightly inclined from the ground. All steles that are set up at the head end of the grave taper symmetrically in an arch - boat-shaped - towards the top and are oriented to the west. West is the direction of the setting sun, where the entrance to the mythical realm of the souls of the dead is at the very edge of the earth . The upper third of the front protrudes forward and appears as an abstract head shape, which is designed with different notches, more rarely with star-shaped, circular and other decorative patterns and separated from the flat lower part by a horizontal cut. In some boat-shaped grave steles (Hungarian fatönkös fejfa ), inscriptions are carved and colored on the smooth surface of the lower part. The back remains unprocessed and rounded according to the trunk shape. The tradition of wooden steles is also continued with young graves.

Catholics and most of the small group of Lutheran Christians in Hungary set up grave crosses, while supporters of the Reformed churches arguably use steles as a mark of distinction. Within these two main forms, specific variants can be assigned to individual regions. Wooden grave steles of this type are only found in cemeteries of Hungarian Reformed churches from the 17th century. Specific shapes and ornaments did not develop until the 19th century. According to a more practical explanation, the boat shape goes back to the times when the dead were brought to the cemetery in boats in the often flooded areas close to rivers. In addition, reference is made to the original home of the Magyars in the Ural region for the cultural background . There fishermen let themselves be buried in their boats and there was the mythological idea that after the death of a person the soul arrives in a boat in a boat.

Szatmárcseke and northeastern Hungary form a distribution region for a certain type of wooden grave stelae called fejfa-fejefa . To the east of it, in the neighboring region of Țara Călatei (Romanian, Hungarian Kalotaszeg) in northwestern Romania , a Hungarian minority lives in around 40 villages who cultivate a distinct traditional folk culture, which also includes carved wooden grave steles called gombfa . In the area between the Danube and Tisza, the largest part of the Hungarian Plain, wooden grave steles are called gombosfa . In the area of ​​the former Szilágy county the steles are called főtől-fűtűlvalófa and in the area of Ordas on the Danube epitafa . The gombfa and gombosfa form a different type of anthropomorphic grave stelae in which the head is depicted as a circular disk on a slender neck. In other steles, square bars that taper upwards from the middle are notched horizontally in the upper area on all four sides, so that a sequence of bulges of different widths up to the crowning ball is created. In Erdőfüle (Hungarian name of Filia, a district of the Romanian community Brăduț in Transylvania ) these are spear-shaped steles with additional diagonally notched patterns that end in four points.

The oldest written evidence of a Protestant burial comes from the town of Nagykőrös in Pest County . The city administration reports in 1638 that the grave of the Calvinist pastor was surrounded with a picket fence. In Karelia , burial forms from the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries are known of the Finns, who are linguistically related to the Magyars, in which the heaped grave was similarly surrounded with wood and a wooden cross or a wooden stele was placed on the head. The oldest known wooden grave stele comes from Kozmatelke (Romanian Cozma ) in Transylvania and was placed on the grave of the Transylvanian prince Ákos Barcsay, who died in 1661. Another wooden stele from the Szeklerland is dated 1678. A number of written sources have come down to us from the 18th century that record the costs of making such steles. The height of ornamented wooden steles was in the second half of the 19th century.

There are four-sided wooden steles with geometric ornaments, for example in Albertirsa in central Hungary, which are not understood as anthropomorphic, but as a symbol of the tree of life . Others are zoomorphic and show horses, for example. The horse depictions refer to Asia and to early nomadic traditions. The specific boat shapes of Szatmárcseke and the surrounding area are understood as remnants of the old Finno-Ugric mythology, in which the soul of the dead reaches the afterlife in a boat. Parallels to this myth are the archaic ideas of the soul ship widespread in Asia, for example in ancient Indonesian mythology, passed down for example in the name of the Tangkuban Perahu volcano on the island of Java and in the mythological connection between the tree of life and the soul ship in the Dayak burial ritual .

literature

Web links

Commons : Szatmárcseke  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Magyarország közigazgatási helynévkönyve, 2015. január 1. Központi Statisztikai Hivatal, 2015
  2. ↑ Márta Kiss, 2014, p. 133
  3. ^ John Kosa: A Century of Hungarian Emigration, 1850-1950 . In: The American Slavic and East European Review, Volume 16, No. 4, December 1957, pp. 501-514, here p. 504
  4. ↑ Szatmárcseke summary . sulinet.hu
  5. ↑ Márta Kiss, 2014, p. 134
  6. ↑ Szatmárcseke Calvinist Cemetery. Atlas Obscura
  7. ↑ Andrew Boros-Kazai: Hungarian Folk Arts and Crafts. Educational Curriculum Kit 6. Hungarian Ethnic Heritage Study of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania) 1981, p. 13
  8. ^ Tünde Zentai: The Sign-Language of Hungarian Graveyards. In: Folklore, Volume 90, No. 2, 1979, pp. 131-140, here p. 135
  9. ^ Anneliese Keilhauer: Hungary. Culture and art in the land of the Magyars . (DuMont Art Travel Guide) DuMont Buchverlag, Cologne 1990, p. 394
  10. ↑ Támas Hofer, Éva Szacsvay: The Discovery of Kalotaszeg and the Beginnings of Hungarian Ethnography. Museum of Ethnography, Budapest 1998
  11. ↑ László Ferenc Novák, 2019, p. 125
  12. ^ Ernő Kunt, 1986, cover picture; László Ferenc Novák, 2019, ill. P. 134
  13. ↑ See the picket fence around a reformed children's grave in Szőlősardó , Northern Hungary. Illustration from 1975, in: Ernő Kunt, 1986, p. 73
  14. ↑ László Ferenc Novák, 2019, pp. 126, 131, 137
  15. ↑ See Siegbert Hummel: The ship of the soul in Lamaism. In: Anthropos, Volume 95, Issue 2, 2000, pp. 555-558
  16. ↑ Cf. Waldemar Stöhr: The religions of the ancient peoples of Indonesia and the Philippines. In: Ders., Piet Zoetmulder: The religions of Indonesia . (= The Religions of Mankind, Volume 5.1) W. Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 1965, p. 176