Grin Igor: Jafi meseországban. Lakatos János sarkadi cigány népmeséi (A Békés Megyei Múzeumok Közleményei 27. Békéscsaba, 2000)

Jafi in Fairyland (Gypsy folk-tales from Sarkad) (Resume) ublishing some thirty Hungarian language Gypsy folk-tales our book shows an up till now unknown part of the oral traditions of Sarkad town and at the same time it expands considerably the existing knowledge about the prosaic folk-poetry of the Békés County Gypsies. The Lowland - as Linda Dégh also refers to it - was regarded by the ethnographies for a long time as a great region being less inspiring for the creation of folk-tales. Till the sixties of the last century no folk-poetry publication had been originating from Sarkad, from the sometime Heyduck settlement, that had belonged in olden times to southern part of Bihar County. At this time was issued the work of Ákos Dömötör, that published the folk-tales of Sarkad. In this work was published the tale repertory - consisting of mainly shorter pieces - of two local tale-tellers. These data - some half of them were imported from Transylvania - and the valuable sentences of Eszter Szendrei, remembering the founders of the settlement, were the only known prosaic oral traditons of the settlement so far. The data of recent revelations in Sarkad put in a new light, and at the same time they make groundless the earliear degrading opinion regarding the folk-tales of the lowland. Concerning the person of János Lakatos, he is a real tale-teller individual, who is to be regarded as an excellent pursuer of the folk-tales traditions. The most of the folk-tale works told by him are belonging to the fairy-tales, hero-tales and short tale-stories, but also some historical and local legends can be found in the collection. The works and texts of Lakatos are based on the living conditions of the Gypsies, but at the same time they are tale contaminations with complicate structure and with several characters. These works are giving evidence of his profound knowledge of the Hungarian folk-tale tradition T 37