Wolf Mária: A borsodi földvár. Egy államalapítás kori megyeszékhelyünk kutatása - Borsod-Abaúj-Zemplén megye régészeti emlékei 10. (Budapest - Miskolc - Szeged, 2019)
Irodalom- és rövidítésjegyzék
BORSOD HILLFORT RESEARCH ON A COUNTY SEAT FROM THE PERIOD OF THE FOUNDING OF THE HUNGARIAN STATE 383 Summary The Bódva River originates at an altitude of 1187 metres on the southern perimeter of the Gömör-Szepes (Slovakian) Ore Mountains, at the foot of Nagy-Csiikerész (Osadnik) Mountain, and has several sources. The approximately 100-km-long Bódva Valley, leading from the Carpathian Mountains into the inner basin, is not one of the largest in this region. Nevertheless, it rivals the others in significance, since the Hemád Valley provides access to only Kassa and Eperjes and the Sajó Valley only to Rozsnyó and Rimaszombat, while the Bódva Valley leads in both directions, connecting two very distinct regions. From mountainous terrain one can access the Great Hungarian Plain via the Miskolc Gate: thus, the Bódva Valley is where the highlands meet the plains. Already in the earliest periods, transportation and commerce were established between these two economically divergent regions. Borsod Hillfort has one of the most favourable locations in the region, at the centre of a wealth of geographic/natural resources. Edelény, a gate to the Bódva Valley, lies at the southern end of the 5-km-long Szendrőlád Gorge (Feketesár); thus it is protected and not easily accessible from the north, while to the south, it is enclosed by open, panoramic countryside. Along its foot ran one of the Carpathian Basin’s ancient, extremely important north-south roads. The Edelény embayment, an area of loosely structured rock, rests on a hard substratum. Borsod Hillfort was built on a 15-metre-high cliff rising from this substratum. We know very little about the Hungarian Conquest Period or early Árpád Age history of the Bódva Valley. The most abundant information we have is linguistic, more specifically place names. Nineteenth-century historians reconstructed a network of Slav settlements based on the indisputably frequent Slav place names in the Sajó and Bódva Valleys and the hills between the rivers. After analysing names of places and bodies of water, István Kniezsa concluded that the Slav population in the Bódva Valley had to date to a period earlier than the 12th century. The most recent linguistic research posits that the Slav population lived in the region before there were written records, that is before 1200. After this period, however, their presence is not verifiable. Linguistic information does not point to any new Slav settlements. Although a rather significant proportion of the place names and micronames arose directly or indirectly from Slav predecessors, a large portion of these can be connected only to Hungarian speakers or, based on their linguistic structure, to both Hungarian and Slav speakers. New linguistic information suggests that the conclusions drawn from the Slav place names in the region, the idea that Slavs must have occupied the area prior to the Hungarian conquest, are tenuous; we have no material of any kind to substantiate this claim. No archaeological finds connected to the Slavs have come to light in either the Sajó or Bódva Valleys. Thus, we must dispense with the commonplace notion, based on place names and reiterated since the 19th century, that an extensive network of Slav settlements once existed in these valleys and the hills in between. Also relying on linguistic information, János Makkay formulated a starkly different opinion. Anonymus’s description of the building of Borsod Hillfort and the meaning of the ‘-d’ suffix in the Conquest Period led him to conclude that the Conquering Hungarians discovered an ancient Hungarian-speaking population in this region who had arrived long before Árpád's Hungarians. We have very little concrete information to help us determine the relationships between the settlements of Bódva Valley prior to the Hungarian conquest. Late Avar graves and finds have been unearthed near Sajószentpéter, in Bódvaszilas, Hidvégardó and Edelény. The finds belong partly to the legacy of the late Avar population characterized by griffin and vine motifs on belt ornaments and can be dated to the second half of the 8th century and the 9th century. We have somewhat more information about the history of the Bódva Valley in the Period of Hungarian Conquest and Early Árpád Age, although we still do not have an abundance of written sources. Early documents do not mention this region. The first account that unmistakably refers to the Bódva Valley and Borsod Hillfort is in Anonymus’s Gesta Hungarorum. During the Hungarian conquest, Chief Árpád sent Chief Bors to this region to investigate the area extending all the way to the Tátra Mountains. Gathering the local population in a suitable location, Bors had a castle built on the banks of the Bódva River, which was then eponymously named Borsod Castle. In this castle, Árpád named Bors ispán, or count, of the castle region, entrusting him with its supervision. Anonymus’s novelistic work cannot be considered a credible historical source even with respect to Borsod. Several 10th-11th century isolated finds (Borsod-Derékegyháza, Edelény-Semmelweis Street, Finke train sta-
