Horváth Attila – Solymos Ede szerk.: Cumania 2. Ethnographia (Bács-Kiskun Megyei Múzeumok Közleményei, Kecskemét, 1974)

J. Vorák: Kolompár Kálmánné kiskunhalasi cigányasszony kézimunkái

give information. We may look for motives of her rigid refusal, however it is not sure whether they will be her real reasons. The desire of the one who practises witchcraft in the presence of others, who tells about his intentions to others, will not be fulfilled, and witchcraft will lose its power. Possibly she was also ashamed to give away to us the gipsy beliefs she connected to the figures she emboidered on the cloths. She only imparted so much of them as not to shock us. — What would the Mácsais have said if they had learned how Mrs. Kolompár intended to bind the faithfulness of the new husband to the new wife? And what would we have said in the Museum if it had come to light about the scissors that when she embroidered them in the „baptismal" cloth her motive was not to afford the girl a tool to cut dresses with but that she intended to keep off the witches from the child? By the way, in the „baptismal" cloth the small green frog and the scissors are side by side. The The adorned bodices of Mrs. Kálmán Kolompár are good examples of how a gipsy woman of Cserepes in Kiskunhalas applies and transforms the elements of costume taken over from her foreign environment according to the laws of the taste and culture of her own people, how she forms them and how she adds to them her own unique art, her „own ideas". tree-frog brings money but it may also have another meaning in connexion with the child. That is the reason why Mrs. Kolompár's cloths cannot be read with full certainty, not even together with the Kiskunhalas gipsy beliefs that can be brought into a supposed connexion with the symbols and with the Hungarian beliefs supporting these. The symbolic significance of most figures we can but try to render probable. The nearer this is to reality, the more beliefs (in the first place Kiskunhalas gipsy beliefs) support it. Still, apart from one or two exceptions, against all such assumptions the justified doubt remains: And what if she did not intend this, but something else? We have to rest satisfied with what their producer declares about the cloths : She sewed luck in them. And if we do not doubt the purity of her intention, we can as well believe this to her. Her cloths deserve attention as objective proofs of a magic act which preserves the symbols of the beliefs of the Kiskunhalas gipsies. This was the reson why we deemed necessary to publish this paper, even if the adorning activity and the „good-luck cloths" of Mrs. Kolompár are unique and individual in their kind and why we attempted to evaluate their meaming. * 205