Cseri Miklós - Horváth Anita - Szabó Zsuzsanna (szerk.): Discover Rural Hungary!, Guide (Szentendre, Hungarian Open Air Museum, 2007)

IX Western Transdanubia

serfs were converted back to Catholicism by their landlords, but the gentry remained Protestant or Lutheran. People supplemented their income by gleaning. Rye, barley, millet and buckwheat were the main crops grown. Animal husbandry also involved the nomadic raising of livestock and pigs were fed on mast in the oak-forests. They were famed for the quality of their cattle which were sold as far as Austria and Germany right up to World War I. The flourishing cattle trade in the second half of the 19th century led to the rapid growth in the middle-class peasant bourgeois stratum of society. Wood was the traditional construction material of the region with wattle- and earth being used where wood was in short supply, even at the turn of the I9th-20th centuries. The carved oaken sills and the hewn and carved pine log walls were usually plastered with mud and then whitewashed. Roofs were generally thatched although tiled roofs also appeared from the middle of the 19th century. The belfry standing in the middle of the regional unit, together with the houses and yards clustering around it invoke the small villages of the lowlands of Zala County whilst the compound on the distant hill conjures up the scattered irregular settlements of the uplands. The press-houses of the Zala hills can be seen further on.