Gyökerek • A Dráva Múzeum tanulmánykötete, 2006

Prologue

PROLOGUE It is a great feeling to hand the fourth volume of the Drava Museum's essaycollection to the Reader. It is a special happiness that apart from our own resources more and more local enterprise and firms support our past explorating work. The volumes of „Gyökerek" (Roots) today can be found on the shelves of many museums, archives and in local county council's libraries in our country, moreover they also have got through the borders. The profession and the interested reader's responses strengthened our hopes in contributing to get to know our culture and environment, our past and our homeland. In 2006 we dealt with historical and ethnographic research of the ethnical minorities in Bares and the surroundings as an important issue. This time we publish essays in connection with the Croatians located next to the river Drava. The southern part of Somogy county after the Turkish occupation is home for Hungarians and Croatians as well. Nowadays the Croatian population lives only in Barcs, Lakócsa, Potony and in some of the smaller surrounding villages, but in the 19. century Croatian communities could be found from Berzence to Vízvár from Bolhó and Bares to the eastern border of the county. The researchers of our volume are dealing with local history and ethnography which explore the topic of Croatians in Bares and in the area next to Drava river from various aspects. These writings contains numerous, until lately haven't publicated data from the topics of migration and ethnical relations, economic and religious studies. A lesser searched topic is Southern Slavian ceramics from the Turkish occupation era, which were examined with the purpose of shedding a light on the life of the Southern Slavians in the Turkish period. In the future we will continue our ethnic minority series. After the Germans and Croatians, in 2007 we are planning to show the Gipsy (Roma) minority as well. We also give place to other author's articles. The next episode of our malacological series gives new, interesting details to the natural sciences of our region. We enrich our Readers' knowledge about the folklore dancing of Somogy county. We continue to explore our recent past: thanks to our authors we remember the local events of kulak-deportation and the undeservedly forgotten Béla Horváth eye specialist professor. We happily see that our essay-collection, which was started four years ago, became not just an expected factor year after year in the life of Drava Museum but also its ring of readers has also widened. Our volumes - which are with the help of foreign language summaries - not irrelevant to the Readers who do not speak Hungarian. Our aim is to worthly represent the achievements and directions of our research work in this local area. Adam Mészáros