Kovács Attila: Földreform és kolonizáció a Lendva-vidéken a két világháború között (Lendva, 2004)
XVII. Summary
Farming families received 1 cadastral acre of land per family member, while artisan families 0.5 cadastral acres per family member, since land already in their property was said to have been taken into consideration. Those with local agrarian interests in the Lendva region were primarily comprised of Slovenians living there and denizens of Slovenian villages bordering the Lendva region and of the settlements of the neighbouring Muraköz region. The land reform raised those with local agrarian interests - who came from families with no or very little land -from the class of the landless, however, gave them too little land for them to be able to create peasant farms capable of fully supporting the family or perhaps even produce for the market. “Colonists with general rights”, “optant-colonists”, “autocolonists” and refugees received slightly more land. In average they were provided with 8 cadastral acres of land per family. “Optant-colonists” in the Lendva region were mostly Slovenian, very occasionally Croatian nationals opted to Yugoslavia from Italy who, after acquiring Yugoslavian citizenship, applied for agrarian land at the authorities implementing the land reform. The group of refugees was made up of Slovenians from the coastline who had been chased from their homes by the First World War (the Italian front). Colonists arriving from the Mura region are to be placed in the group of “colonists with general rights”, who enjoyed similar rights to the “optantcolonists”. Among the different colonist groups, the dobrovoljaces were in the best situation, since they usually received 10 cadastral acres, for which the compensation was assumed by the state, while the other colonist groups paid the compensation after agrarian land themselves. During the land reform the servants and valets also received land in the form of severance pay. The servants at the Alsólendva Manor of the Esterházy estate received agrarian land as severance pay in March 1931, while the servants at the Zsitkóc Manor were provided with land in accordance with a decree issued on 20 March 1933. During the agrarian reform performed in the Yugoslavian state between 1918 and 1941, the national minorities of the country were excluded from acquiring land, despite the fact that the decrees and laws governing the land reform itself did not contain anti-minority sections. It is worth mentioning that while Hungarians - and other non-state-creating minorities - in other parts of the Serbian-Croatian-Slovenian Kingdom were excluded from land distribution as of the first year of the land reform with reference made to the right of opting, in the Lendva region that only 411
