Cseh Valentin szerk.: „70 éve alakult a MAORT” – tanulmányok egy bányavállalat történetéből (2009)
Zsuzsa Kovács: The Oil Age and Its Impact on Everyday Village Life In Zala County's Settlements
Research in Gellénháza During the summer of 2008, we engaged in investigations in this village, which lies 12 km to the south-west of Zalaegerszeg, in the scope of a one-week long ethnographical research camp, for the purpose of exploring the transformation of everyday life at the settlement from the 1950s onwards. The camp's participants chose subtopics as the subject of their research in the scope of their work, so as to get to know the settlement's life as in-depth as possible. Some ot them engaged in getting to know the oil industry worker and engineer 'colony' that settled in the village, others looked at how identity changed, as well as miscellaneous subjects serving to reach understanding about everydav life. My chosen topic in this work was the examination of 'cube-houses' that appeared en masse from the 1960s, with which - according to my assumption - it was not just the village that got a new image, but the evervdav life of families was also placed on new foundations. For the most part, these buildings replaced the old, thatched roof or loam-walled structures, while OTP or BSH loans provided the material funding required for construction. Families taking jobs in the oil industry that was just settling in at the village were eligible for the BSH, i.e. Miner's Own House loan, and thev also received free designs and building materials delivery in addition to the cash loans. With these favourable conditions at hand, new buildings mushroomed along the village main street, christened after Lajos Kossuth starting from the second half of the 1950s. Its inhabitants became the young families who got jobs at the oil plant that payed quite a good salary in relation to the circumstances of the rimes, therefore they engaged in a lifestyle based on their paid labour in the midst of production relations that had changed in the wake of the transformation of agriculture, which nevertheless did not leave the land behind. In order to make the investigation more in-depth, as well as to interpret its findings, it is necessary for us to comprehend the change process that dawned upon lite m the village as the oil industry appeared. The new types of houses have their place in this system of relations, along with the investigation of newly implemented life patterns, the identity of the village, community life, and numerous other subjects that the studies included in the volume are about. Therefore I will not address my specific research subject in my paper, but its antecedent - as it were - instead, namely the exploration of circumstances; in the hope that this will aid the better understanding of the other studies in this tome. ''Black gold" in the country s most archaic county The beginnings of crude oil production in Zala County go back to the 1930s, when the drilling conducted at the presumed oilfield in Budafapuszta proved successful. Test drilling was followed by the boring of a well, then regular oil production began from 1938, after the incorporation of the FIungarian-American Oil Industries Limited Company, MAORT. 24 i\L\ORT was nationalized in 1949, and the company continued operation under the name of MASZOLAJ, which stood for Hungarian-Soviet Oil Company. 24 '" 1 : '" SRÁGLI 20(14, 16. m SRÁGLI 2004,107.
