Acta Papensia 2003 - A Pápai Református Gyűjtemények Közleményei 3. évfolyam (Pápa, 2003)
1-2. szám
The Past and Present of Village Histories in Hungary IF we sum UP the papers and surveys on the history of historiography we can come to the astonishing conclusion that village monographs have hardly been covered by our bibliography. This lack in itself may also instigate us to investigate what role was and is played by the research of the history of villages in our historiography. The beginnings of regional history go back to the 18th century, when Mátyás Bél (1684-1749) and his followers found it important to record the short history of settlements as part of the county descriptions. The 19th century concept of history did not bring anything new in this particular field, since its best representatives like Frigyes Pesty, Vilmos Fraknói (1872) and later Károly Tagányi (1894) could not abstract the history of villages from those of the counties either. (There was a different situation with the municipalities of rectified councils which were legally treated as villages, as these earlier market towns had already established their identities in urban monographs at around this time.) The breakthrough was brought by the village exploring movement between the two world wars, who have established the genre of village monographs. Originally, village monographs concentrated on the comprehensive description of contemporary conditions, and history as such was only important if it was able to explain the genesis of particular economic, social and cultural phenomena. Later on, however, these pro-portions have totally changed and the reality permeated with politics and political ideologies were pushed into the background. A qualitatively new chapter was begun in the history of the genre from the 1990s, when local governments with their freshly regained autonomy started to consider the history of their own settlements an important means of local identity, so they had the history of the settlements written. During the past 12 years since the transformation of the regime, approximately 500 comprehensive settlement histories (urban and village monographs) have been published in Transdanubia alone, which means that about 40 regional monographs were sold on the bookmarket every year. From among the counties it is County Veszprém takes the lead (with nearly 100 volumes) followed by County Somogy and Sopron, but County Zala and others have also produced a significant number of regional monographs. On a national scale - taking earlier publications also into consideration — there are more than a thousand regional monographs in circulation. The old dream of village explorers seems to come true that each town, village and larger settlements should all have their own monographs.
