Cseri Miklós, Füzes Endre (szerk.): Ház és ember, A Szabadtéri Néprajzi Múzeum évkönyve 8. (Szentendre, Szabadtéri Néprajzi Múzeum, 1992)

BAKÓ FERENC: Tállya mezőváros uradalmi pincéi

WINE CELLARS AT THE MARKET TOWN OF TÁLLYA The author's main objective was to find out what data and facts local wine cellars can provide to reveal the history of a place. The cellars hewn into soft volcanic tuff are characteristic constructions in Northern Hungary. There are thousands of them with many dating from ancient times and being contemporary with Romanesque and Gothic churches and palaces. Certain data seem to bear out the assumption that medieval cellars had more luck in surviving the Turkish and other wars than buildings of the same age erected above ground. Pit cellars carved into rocks, without constructed walls, are used for stroring wine in many parts of Southern Europe. The northernmost examples could be found, besides the Carpathian Basin, in some French wine countries. Hungarian historians have established that French-Walloon settlers had an important role in the development of wine production in the country during the 11th-14th centuries. Their memory is still alive in the village names including the word tálya (from the French word taille) in the vicinity of the town of Eger (Kistálya and Nagytálya). The only other place bearing a similar name in the Carpathian Basin is Tállya in Zemplén County. The author investigates the connection between these villages and the Walloon settlers in the fields of grape-growing, wine-making, and the storage of wine. The French-Walloon origin and its traces, apart from the rather scarce historical sources, have not yet been thoroughly studied. The population whose settlement can be ascribed to the 11th-14th centuries was eradicated by the Mongol and Turkish invasions, and the exact location of the settlement have changed several times since then. In spite of all this the inhabitants of Tállya have a folk custom that may be of Walloon origin. Tállya people hold the martyr, St. Wenceslaus in great veneration, which they show by decorating their church every autumn with vine leaves and bunches of grape, walking in procession, and operating a religious society of vine-dressers. This cult cannot be traced in any other place in the Carpathian Basin. However the family name Vencel (Hungarian equivalent for Wenceslaus) occurs in two places (Gyanafalva-Jennersdorf and Buda) and can be associated in both cases with the Walloons. The fact that Wenceslaus was a Czech saint brings into mind the possibility that these Walloon groups did not come straight from Belgium but arrived from Bohemia in Hungary, as was the case of some of the German settlers. The study makes a detailed research into the Walloon connection by examining the rock-hewn cellars, generally used in the "Tállya" villages around Eger and in Zemplén County, many of which have been inspected on the spot and/or subjected to technical survey. From the approximately 500 cellars in Tállya the manorial ones, that served for the storage of the wine tithe due to the landlord, can be considered the oldest. In lack of written sources it is rather difficult to determine the age of a cellar, but considering certain circumstances we can arrive at a fairly close estimate. Such factors are for example, the position of the construction within the structure of the settlement, its ground plan arrangement, and particularly the form of vaults and cross sections. The cellars around the church dating from the 14th-15th centuries are probably of the same age and can be considered the oldest of such constructions in the village. Unlike the semicirculat cellar vaults, common in Upper Northern Hungary, Tállya vaults have a form closer to a pointed arch, which the author calls "sipka-ív" (c. cap-arch) and considers a provincial survival of the gothic style. In sum, we can state that the earliest relics of the market town Tállya have roots, although somewhat ambiguous, in the Middle Ages, when its name was given by Walloon settlers. The cellars do not reveal such connections, there or in the villages around Eger. The relics introduced in the study, although tied to the Middle Ages, are not necessarily proofs of any connection with the Walloons.