Agria 37. (Az Egri Múzeum Évkönyve - Annales Musei Agriensis, 2001)

Császi Irén: Bábuk és bubák. Babakészítés Észak-Magyarországon

Hungarian areas. One can find the doll used for playing with, the doll in traditional folk dress, the comforting dolly for those who are ill and the doll used in traditional folk customs. The doll is considered to be an imitative kind of toy. By mimicking their chosen role models with the aid of their doll, little girls can discover what these particular grown-up women are like. The toys belonging to this group are initially made by adults and larger children for the smaller children, before the children themselves made their own dolls from natural materials. Several versions are known to us: rag dolls, rag dolls filled with bran, dolls made from rags and twigs, babies in swaddling clothes, dolls made from corncobs, rush dolls, paper dolls, poppy dolls and dolls made from fruit and vegetables. The everyday events and the special occasions were played out with their dolls. Playing with dolls helped to prepare girls for life in the family, fortheir roles as mothers and for life within the community as a whole. The dolls wearing folk costume are mementoes. They were made to be given as presents, showing the rich costume of one or two local villages. The costumed dolls constitute a group in their own right, and the dolls the women made were meant to immortalise the costumes of their own village. The people who made these dolls dressed them in the costumes which had once been worn on an everyday basis. Indeed, the very reason for making these dolls was to keep some kind of record for posterity. The seamstresses and the other women who sewed, learned from each other, making decorative dolls from pieces of old and hardly worn old folk costumes. Doll-making still goes on in the villages of Gyöngyöspata and Boldog. These costumed dolls also took part in the folk customs as well, where they were used as presents to give to the bride at the wedding reception. In the Mátraalja the doll was a present given together with the bed to the young man's house which would become the bridal home. At the wedding celebrations in Gyöngyöspata the groom is allowed to dance with the bride only a doll. The folk-costumed doll also makes an appearance in religious folk ritual at the patronal festival in Varsány where the Rimoc girls gave dolls as presents. We also find rag dolls being used in folk medicine. The dolls which were used to ward off illness were made of linen and tied together with string. In Novaj in Heves County abscesses would be rubbed with the doll, which would then be thrown into the Stations of the Cross. Another branch of folk-costumed dolls belongs to the field of the folk handicrafts, where such a demand was created that this particular branch of the crafts enjoyed somewhat of a renaissance. These particular dolls, made to designs and patterns of doll-maker Anna Krencsey in the folk art co-operative from 1960, are most definitely decorative objects. Using a textile head and hands and a special technique for forming the body and the costume under the authority of the Folk Handicrafts Council, she taught the ladies of the Szécsény Palóc, the Matyó and the Kalocsa Folk Arts Co-operatives. The doll makers now keep the techniques of the Szécsény and the Matyó Co-operatives alive. During the second half of the 20

th century changes in life styles have meant the forms used in the making dolls have either been simplified, or fallen into a state of oblivion. However, the importance of traditional games is once again being recognised in schools. There is a trend in contemporary toy culture which encourages the use of natural materials and traditional techniques. Indeed, we are currently going through something of a golden age in the production of folk-costumed dolls, to which this study has attempted to provide some models. 421