Lukács László (szerk.): Märkte und Warenaustausch im Pannonischen Raum - István Király Múzeum közelményei. A. sorozat 28. (Székesfehérvár, 1988)

Lubica Falt'anová: The Main Directions of Trade from Slovakia

over the river Tisza and the lower Danube, near the Black Sea and in the Balkans". (23) The extent of this trading is illustrated by the statement that: "The property of a lace-maker may be just a few hundreds florins at home-, but he has a credit in Vienna for thousands."(24) The lace-makers had been so very involved in the trading activity of this town that when in the 1850s their trading was prohibited, "the Vienna merchants and the factory owners obtained fresh permission for them, because without the lace-makers also there was not the desired demand for their own merchandise."(25) In Budapest during the summers the lacevendors traded in lace in the big town markethalls: it was financially more advantageous than the earnings from peddling, "hausierung".(26)

While some types of home-production and trading with home-made products were restricted to a narrow regional occurrence(lace-making, linen-weaving) many tools of everyday use and various useful objects (dishes, agricultural implements, technical tools and partly also building material) produced from wood were directed from almost the whole of Slovakia towards the lowland regions of Hungary. But some specific features of trading also developed,according to the region. For instance, the region with the most intensive production of and trading in wooden dishes was situated in the Slovak-Moravian borderland (villages of Stará Turá, Lubina). The traders with wooden dishes had practically unlimited directions for selling and, with the exception of Bohemia and Moravia, they use'' to go to Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade etc. The distribution of large quantities of products made from wood, brushwood and straw from other parts of Slovakia, mainly from villages situated near the rivers Váh and Hron, was secured by water transport in rafts, dust as the major export floated on rafts from Liptov was represented by dairy produce, so the export from Orava which operated still in the 19th century was represented by wooden products (and also by some products in metal and stone). These products were either home-made or from the monopoly-production of a contractor. The villages in Central Slovakia, where the most remarkable growth in the manufacture and sale of wooden products was recorded at the beginning of the 19th century, exported their products to Pest. (27)

Another system of trade organization was noted in the important region of wooden products distribution, Novohrad, Hont and Gemer. There were examples here, specifically in Novohrad's villages of Turifcky, Mládzovo and Rovfiany, where peasants trading in wooden products founded their own association, "Cestovné tovariSstvo". Already in the 1860s it was divided according to the areas of their interest as witnessed also by the names of its individual groups such as Szentendre, Vác, Háres and Túr as well as Buda and Pest.(28)

Products of basket-work or of brushwood and straw also had an important place in Slovakian exports. They were mentioned several times in connection with trade transfer by means of rafts. From the quantitative point of view the data about the export of brooms are interesting. At the end of the 19th century about 300 000 brooms were purchased from broom-makers in Beckov. In the spring they were delivered by folk-vendors on rafts to Vienna and Budapest. According to this late 19th century source: "last year, as far as I could obtain reliable information, the inhabitants of BoSáca exported about 200 000 birch brooms to Pest."(29) We also know that brooms from villages in the surroundings of Ïrenïin were exported by middlemen to Lower Hungary in trucks.(30)

The potters had also their share in the export from Slovakia. They worked

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