Paládi-Kovács Attila: A Barkóság és népe (Miskolc, 2006)

Angol nyelvű összefoglaló

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 women and the girls slept. In the latter half of the 19th Century there was a gradual change from construction with wood to building walls with mud and adobe. The more wealthy began to build from stone and brick. The manner of heating changed with the appearance of the open chimney and the setting up of a separate kitchen from what had been the antechamber, in the 20th Century. In the 1880s houses with wooden arcaded verandas and arched, arcaded outside corridors and gables began to appear (Fig. 43). Furnishings and furniture also changed with the boxes made by joiners being replaced by furniture produced by carpenters. Up to the end of the 19th Century lighting came from chaving torches, oil lamps and candles. Electrification took place between 1920 and 1940 while some villages only received electricity after 1950. Even today the farm buildings maintain many traditional elements of folk architecture. The most important are the barns which were used to store grains and to thresh them (Fig. 44-47). 6. One characteristic of the nutritional culture of the highland Hungarian is a soup made with a variety of pickled ingredients and thickened with milk or sour cream. The Barkós strictly kept the days of fast prescribed by the church. During Lent they cooked a mush with sour bran (kiszi). They still maintain a weekly menu in which Monday, Wednesday and Friday are meatless, while meat is consumed on Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday. Bread was traditionally made from rye flour. The more isolated villages only shifted to bread from wheat in the 1920s. The dough for their bread was carefully leavened with a yeast prepared at home (a thin flour paste, kovász, pár). They sometimes baked a flat bread