Paládi-Kovács Attila: A Barkóság és népe (Borsodi Kismonográfiák 15. Miskolc, 1982)

The Barkó people were famous stock-traders, a renown going back for centuries. They bought their oxen and horses in the region by the Tisza River, and sold them in the area called the highlands (today a part of Slovakia). They also acted as dealers for sheep and swine. The women brought food, principally milk products, eggs and poultry, to the industrial settlements to sell (Fig. 36). 5. The way of life in the Barkóság was that of the tiny closed village. Settlements were scattered and there were no towns in the region. The villages were all located in valleys, along the banks of creeks. The village lay-out was rows of streets, while the smaller villages consisted of a single street. Most of the plots of land on which the homes were built were long and narrow, but in the villages of the one-time lesser nobility block lots are also plentiful. A fence surrounded the settlement at the border between the gardens and the fields, with gates in the fences by the roads only (village gate). One characteristic of the Barkó village is the long courtyard, in which from four to five to as many as eight to nine homes were built in a row. Originally siblings, or relatives lived in them. The inhabitants of the smaller villages consisted of families with two to three identical family names (they were decendents of the same family or clan). These communities of relatives were grouped together within the settlement and the part of the settlement where they lived bore their name. Up until the mid 19th Century the most important building material was oak, and the most significant roofing material was rye straw. Today the log walls built of beams are only a memory. Walls of beams with wooden frameworks can still be seen in a few homes, but there are more walls of this kind still surviving in sheds. The wooden walls of the dwellings were sealed with mud inside and out, and whitewashed (Fig. 37). The rooves of the houses were supported by purlin beams, which rested on giant branched posts at the two ends of the houses, with their bottoms deep within the soil (Fig. 39). For at least a hundred years now the roof structure has been built on a frame which does not require a purlin beam. The rooves were thatched with rye straw, bound into sheafs until about 1900 when a gradual shift to clay shingles began. An the turn of the century most of the homes had three inside units but only the large room could be heated. The heating was done by an oven with a flat top, built at an angle, which also had a fire bench used for cooking. The smoke outlet led into the attic (Fig. 40). The house did not have a chimney. There was a narrow antechamber alongside the room and an unheated pantry opened off the latter. This was generally the place where the young girls slept. 191