S. Perémi Ágota (szerk.): A Laczkó Dezső Múzeum közleményei 29. (Veszprém, 2019)

Ócsai Éva: Lokális történet és népiesség a Balaton térségében két későromantikus elbeszélő költeményben

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Local History and Folklore of the Lake Balaton District in Two Late-Romantic Epic Poems (Bujdosó magyarok [Hungarian Outlaws], Ősök nyoma [The Trail of the Ancestors] by Károly Csizmadia)

This paper aims to examine how locality, history and folklore are represented in two epic poems written by a forgotten local peasant-writer near Lake Balaton. The late-romantic book by Károly Csizmadia, born in Balatonkenese, was published in Veszprém in 1905, and it contextualizes local places of memory in the district of Lake Balaton in order to tell individual and collective stories connected to Hungarian historical events and figures. The nearly 300-page volume, divided into four-line stanzas, was written in the spirit of Romanticism, and it uses various forms of folklore and couleur locale as part of the cultural narrative. In the two texts, the central places of collective memory are the medieval church of the present-day Balatonfűzfő, which was part of the village of Máma, the numerous cave dwellings in the wall of yellow stone on the shore

of Lake Balaton near Balatonkenese, which were carved by local inhabitants fleeing either from the Turks or the Mongols, and the 300-year-old elm tree which, as local legends have it, used to stand on the flatland of Akarattya, and Ferenc Rákóczi, the wealthy Hungarian aristocrat who was the leader of the forces against the Habsburgs, tied his horse to it. This paper offers lessons in the historical, spatial and narrative construction of the epigone epic poems which were influenced by the ethnopopulist or popular national literary tradition and elite culture dominant at the turn of the 20th century. It begins by examining the genres and narrative tools used in the tragic stories, then it analyses the plot structure of the texts which reveals how the folk narrative represents history and the local communities.

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