Torsello, Davide - Pappová, Melinda: Social Networks in Movement. Time, interaction and interethnic spaces in Central Eastern Europe - Nostra Tempora 8. (Somorja-Dunaszerdahely, 2003)

Interethnic spaces

Between cultural and geographical borders 155

7. Between cultural and geographical borders. Denomination of the Mátyusföld region

József Liszka

PL

Mátyusföld1 is a geo-historical region that lies in the southwest of Slovakia. Its precise circumscription, however, is problematic since local people, historians, and ethnographers define the boundaries of the region using different criteria. In the following, I will try to analyse the particular opinions concerning the circumscription of the region, then provide certain guidelines that make these views treatable from an ethnographic point of view.

To my knowledge, the term Mátyusföld appeared for the first time in a Hungarian text of a 16,h century poem entitled Az zsidó és magyar nemzetről ("On the Jewish and Hungarian nation”) by András Farkas.

...Magyarokat adá török markába,

Kik ah Sarlóközből, ah bő Mátyus földéből,

Szálából, Somogyból, ah Szerém földéről,

Ah széles alföldről sok népet elhajtának.2

(In Szilády 1880: 20)