Cseh Valentin szerk.: „70 éve alakult a MAORT” – tanulmányok egy bányavállalat történetéből (2009)

Zsuzsa Kovács: The Oil Age and Its Impact on Everyday Village Life In Zala County's Settlements

during the precipitation heavy and cold winter weather, being shut off from goods supply, as well as all other connections to the outside world.

253 In many ways, this situation hardly changed even in the 1950s. During the investigated period, Gellénháza was also listed among impoverished, medium size settlements. From the organisational aspect, it was still a part of Nagylengyel, which was the seat of the rural district, and where the local practitioner's surgery was located. The number ot its inhabitants was 750, the majority of whom lived in thatch-roofed log cabins. The fact that the council decided about naming the streets and numbering houses, which bore no names and numbers before, only in 1954 tells a lot about the village's size and the conditions there; the reason cited was that the number of out-of-towners was on the rise since the oil industry arrived, and the postman found it difficult to deliver their mail. The main street was named Kossuth Lajos Street, the one in the village's western end Stalin, and the one on the eastern side Petőfi.

254 The size of plots hardly exceeded 5 acres on average in Gellénháza,

255 which in many cases was not even suitable to grow enough produce to meet the needs of the multi-generation farming families. Before the arrival of oil jobs, many people used to travel to Tolna, Vas and Somogy counties to work as day-labourers. People did not often go to the county see 10 kilometres away, because this took 3 hours of walking or 1.5 hours on a cart on account of the bad roads. Bus transportation only became possible from 1950, after certain main road sections were paved with asphalt, but travel continued to remain arduous because of the irregular and overcrowded services.

26 Following the creation of the Nagylengyel Crude Oil Production Company, however, deeply rooted changes came to the life in the village. The oil industry at Gellénháza Directly before the oil industry settled in, people living here were burdened with mandatory surrendering ot produce similarly to the other parts of the country, which deepened families' misery even further. The company created in 1952 thus arrived with perfect timing in order to offer opportunides for making a livelihood. The reason being is that for the people living here, working in the oil industry meant the predictability for which there were not too many examples in post1948 Hungary until the 1960s. The ever-changing economic and political conditions limited families' opportunities significantly, because of which short-term thinking came to be the definitive life strategv.

2:i As opposed to this, the inhabitants of the village and its vicinity found security in the certain and good pav that industry settling down at the Nagylengyel oilfield provided. Coexistence with the oil company and the masses of new-comers arriving to the village, however, was not always cloudless. Initially, infrastructure in the village was not suitable for providing 253 NÉMETH 1935,79. 4 ZML Gellénháza Milage Council Executive Committee minutes of meeting, [anuary 11, 1954. :

" ZML Lexikon of Local History, Gellénháza documents. 34 According to evidence in the Executive Committee minutes of meeting from [anuary IS, 1954, the villagers were complaining about the bus service to Zalaegerszeg being so crowded bv the time it got to Petrikereszttir, that it did not stop for any more passengers at the Gellénháza crossing, where commuters from the village, as well as from Iborfia and Lickóvadamos. The passengers walked 4-6 kilometres in mud, dien waited 1-1.5 hours without avail, nobody was allowed to board the bus. The members of the EC therefore requested MAVAL'T's (the bus company's) management to start another service for this route. ;r VALUCH 2004,386.