H. Kolba Judit szerk.: Historical Exhibition of the Hungarian National Museum Guide 2 - From the Foundation of the State until the Expulsion of the Ottomans - The history of Hungary in the 11th to 17th centuries (Budapest, 2005)

ROOM 6 - Hungary Split into Three Parts. The Ottoman Occupation (second half of the 16th century-17th century) (Ibolya Gerelyes)

55. Stove tile Nadah (Nadah), 1st half of the 16th century Great Plain settlements shows elongated villages with L-shaped houses in two rows, built 45 to 70 metres apart from each other, with the church on a conspicuous site in the settlement. This loose form of settlement is also connected with large-scale animal husbandry, previously emphasized. Linked to this is a map showing cattle exports, and a picture by the 17th-century engraver Julius Nypoort with a depiction of a cattledrive. The pottery items show the characteristic types of earthenware from the mid-16th century to the end of the 17th century. This choice illustrates at the same time that Hungarian potters active on the occupied territories followed the earlier traditions of their craft in the Turkish times, too. Exceptionally fine pieces of rural stovemaking art are the stove tiles, found in the ruins of the castle of Nadah (Nadah) and showing men knocking down acorns (Fig. 55), and the palace-shaped item, found on the territory of the mediaeval village of Csaba. An ornamental dish with an ear for hanging, found in the castle of Ozora and dating from the 17th century, is a piece representative of the popular pottery of the period. A strange paradox of the age is that despite the war conditions or perhaps because of them, silversmith's and goldsmith's art flourished in the market-towns. The treasure troves which have been unearthed indicate the flight of a population often compelled to run away and unable to return to its old dwelling place; their number increases abruptly on Hungarian territory from the early 16th century onwards. These hidden treasures - for example, the finds at Tolna and Makó - containing the treasured items of well-to-do citizens of the market-towns - their silver beakers, spoons and the characteristic accessories of their attire, such as chains, belt mountings and clasps - recall the everyday life of the time and also give us a more detailed picture of the silversmith's art of the period. THE REFORMATION IN THE MARKET-TOWNS The doctrines of Martin Luther reached Hungary as early as the 1520s. The German inhabitants of the royal free towns and the Saxon towns adopted them quickly and almost to a man. Of the Hungarian population, at the beginning only a few aristocrats became adherents of the Reformation, but by the middle of the century almost the whole of Hungarian society had embraced it. Individual market-towns acquired a special role in the Reformation process. Despite the fact that the majority of the pioneers of the Hungarian Reformation came from the market-towns, the population of these settlements adopted the new creed only at the end of the 1530s and in the 1540s. By the end of the century 80 per cent of the country followed one or the other of the reformed faiths, most of them Calvinism. The rapid spread of the Reformation was promoted by the Bible published in the Hungarian language (1590), by religious books and by the texts of theo-