Horváth Attila – Solymos Ede szerk.: Cumania 5. Ethnographia (Bács-Kiskun Megyei Múzeumok Közleményei, Kecskemét, 1978)

Novák L.: A Duna Tisza köze temetőinek néprajza

They ordered to bury the dead within 24 hours. The magisrates of the villages and country-towns also regulated the vigil of dead bodies in order to prevent the damage of the family members' health by the corpse (particularly in case of an epidemic). With administrative means they ended the laying out in state of the dead in the cemetery around the church and prohibited even the delivery of a speech at the coffin inside the fence of the church. The custom of laying out the body in the house, in the tiszta s^pba (clean room) and carrying it to the cemetery after the delivery of a farewell speech, that is still in use in our century, developed at that time. The decrees issued in the 18th century also prescribed that the graves had to be dug deep and to be formed high mounds on the tombs in special cases. These were sanitary regulations in order to protect the living from the bodies buried into graves particularly in periods of epidemics. There can be stated that the graves were dug in a depth of one fathom -öl = 1,8 to 2 m). In some cases graves were dug much deeper, e. g. in the villages of Makád and Szigetszentmiklós on the Csepel Island to 6 m. The digging of ^very deep graves had special causes going back to social traditions. In the region between the Danube and Tisza rivers two types of graves are dug: simple, so-called talpas (soled) graves with straight walls, and pandalos or padlonos ones with a side-niche at their bottoms. The diffusion of these two types are determined by geographical factors. Simple graves with straight walls are dug into sandy soil of loose consistence, the other type is common in hard groupds (e. g. the latter can be found in every village, with the exception of Dunavecse and Pereg, along the Danube and also in villages and country-towns along the flood basin of the Tisza river, thus in Abony, Cegléd, Nagykőrös, Tószeg, etc. The graves with side-niches preserve ancient social traditions. Since the decrees issued in the 18th century prescribed the burials in rows within the lots, the members of each a given family could not be buried in well-determined parts of the cemetery. In relation of single graves, however, such traditions could develop making family graves from the pandalos ones. On the bottom of such a grave, a pandal, niche, was dug either on the left or on the right side according to the succession of death. Each one coffin was placed into each of these niches, and a third one in the middle. There happened that also a fourth coffin was placed on to the middle one or that a third niche was dug on one side above an earlier one. Such a grave system could develop only in the case of deep graves. E. g. in Szigetszentmiklós the depths of the graves vary between 2 and 6 m whose explanation is that there the upper soil layer is clay, and sand lies below it in which side-niches could easily be cut. In this way the graves could be dug down to 6 m depending the falling gradient of the soil layers. Also the digging of graves was carried out according to the social traditions of the communities. In the morning of the burial the male relatives, neighbors, and friends assembled in the cemetery and dug the grave. In some villages as many as 30 to 40 persons came together, however, in average ten men did the job. At the funeral relatives, neighbors, and friends generally appeared equipped with shoveis and helped to fill up the grave and to form a small mound on the tomb. By the end of this work, a marker was put onto the tomb. In connection with grave markers and funerals one has to refer to the religious and ethnic relations too. In the region between the Danube and Tisza rivers, Catholics, Presbyterians, and Lutherans are the main religious groups. The diffusion of Protestantism started there in the first half of the 16th century when Márton Kálmáncsehi Sánta began to preach the reformation by 1525. The new religion quickly spread, and in this respect the Turkish occupation of the region (in the 16th and 17th centuries) also helped a lot. In that period the influence of the Catholic Church diminished over the territory controlled by the Turks, and the Turks themselves did not put obstacles in the way of the diffusion of the Reformation. In the life of Protestantism a breach took place in the region by the end of the 17th century and also in the 18th century. After pushing out the Turks, the Catholic Shurch — in order ot strengthen its position — declared war against Reformation. The re-convertion to Catholicism happened in two ways in the region between the Danube and Tisza rivers. One of the most important factors was the re-settlement of the depopulated willages with catholic inhabitants. In course of such re-settlements catholic German, Slovakian, and Southern Slavic ethnic groups arrived in the region, and also the sett297