Transylvanian Local Treasure Legends

(3033 szóból áll a szöveg)
(1314 olvasás)  

Synopsys

<small>Brief summary of local treasure legends of Transylvania's Székelyföld and Sachsenland, based on the collections of Balázs Orbán and Friedrich Müller. In English.

Rövid öszzegezése a székely- és szászföldi helyi kincsmondáknak, Orbán Balázs és Friedrich Müller gyűjteményei alapján. Angol nyelven.</small>

Louis J. Elteto (Portland State University):

"The bell of URBIGEN was found by twelve piglets." This simple, absurd statement is an elegant example of a local legend. Meaningless out of context, to the folklorist it provides a wealth of information, if he knows its source: that it was recorded a century and a half ago in Transylvania. Then, even though Urbigen is no longer on the map and its original population has long since disappeared, he will deduce that Urbigen was a German village somewhere in Transylvania's Sachsenland; that it had, once upon a time, been overrun by an enemy; that its people had buried what valuables they could not take along on their flight, including their church bell; and that later, when the locale was resettled and the battle long forgotten, the bell was miraculously found, perhaps by the village pigherd. The folklorist will of course not be able to ascertain whether his deductions are historically true; he will only be able to state that the denizens ofUrbigen probably believed them to be true at the time the item was recorded.

All this does not shed new light upon the colorful history of Transylvania, an Ohio-sized area of mixed Rumanian, Hungarian and German population that has changed, through the fortunes of war, from the eastern half of Hungary to the western half ofRumania. But we are long past the point of treating folklore as a source of history. What remains of interest to us is what folklore has to tell us of its carriers.

Of the various types of oral tradition, the local legend (cf. German Ortssage, Hungarian helyi monda), a legend tied to a specific locale or to a physical object in a given locale, has been rather neglected by serious scholarship of late. Understandably so, since, if its content is no longer of historiographic importance, there would seem to be little value in collecting it and studying it. It has, after all, ususally no literary merit, and the more literate it becomes, the less likely it is to be genuine. Too, the age of the legend is rapidly passing, at least in areas that have experienced large scale industrialization; urbanization, and massive population shifts. The carriers of legends, the local peasant communes, are rapidly disappearing the world over.

Sadly, few thorough, reliable, and systematic collections of local legends were made in Europe in the 19th century after the Grimms had sparked interest in the genre, at a time when such research would still have been fruitful, and such collections as we have were often compiled with methods and aims that makes them next to useless today. But there are exceptions: two such were made in Transylvania by two eminent scholars, Bishop Friedrich Müller (1828-1915) among Saxon peasants, and by Baron Balázs Orbán among Hungarians.

Muller spent a generation collecting data in 144 villages, and recorded 333 original legends; these, along with 287 others that he borrowed from published sources (many of which do not fit our definition of a local legend at all), he published in final form in Vienna in 1885 (1). Orbán's work is, by contrast, a six-volume scientific travelogue in the Humboldtean tradition, titled [in translation] "A description of the Székely Land from an Historical, Archaeological, Natural-Historical and Ethnological Perspective", which appeared in Pest serially from 1868 to 1874 (2). Orbán devoted seven years exclusively to researching the seven so-called Székely seats or counties of Transylvania, originally a border-guard area of medieval Hungary that had enjoyed special rights and privileges, and for him the folklore element, especially the local legend, was incidental; nevertheless, I have been able to isolate 672 legends in this huge work, which he collected in 244 localities. Since the Saxon and the Székely lands are contiguous, and since their population had lived side by side for some seven centuries, sharing religion and history in the broader sense, and differing from each other chiefly in language, the two collections provide us with information uniqely suited to a comparative study.

My attempt here is limited to examining those items in the two collections that contain a reference to a supernatural, i.e., either mythical or superstitious character. The difference between the latter two is one of contemporary belief. Thus giants, so popular with both groups, I have called mythical, since no-one believed that giants still existed at the time the legends were recorded; while witches, still very real, especially among the Germans, I have labeled superstitious.(3)

A purely statistical comparison of the two collections reveals some of the basic differences between the two groups. Thus, while 152 of the 333 German legends, or 46% contain supernatural characters, only 133 of the 672 Hungarian items, or 20% do so. The distinction is even clearer if we make a comparison by character type.

Accordingly, the following number of mentions were made, in parallel:

[Character:German:Hungarian]:

Treasure: 56 , 78
Ghost: 32, 11
Witch: 27, 2
Giant: 25, 30
Sorcerer: 13, 2
Devil: 13, 11
God: 7, 25
Dragon: 5, 5
Dwarf: 3, 3
Water Sprite: 1, 2
Fairy: 0, 31
Magic Animal: 8, 9

We cam conclude from the above that the Germans were more likely to mention the supernatural than were the Hungarians, but that their character-types were more likely to be superstitious (82% vs. 66%). And within this category, 62% of the Ferman, but only 25% of the Hungarian characters were demonological or evil in nature (witches, devils, black magic). Clearly, the German villagers believed much more in dark forces around them than did their Hungarian neighbors.

To illustrate this further, let us examine just one subcategory, the treasure legend. Not surprisingly, this is the largest corpus in both collections: hitting it rich is a universal human dream. The following are two typical examples of such legends, the first Hungarian, the second German:

1. A hill at Mezősámsond is called Pogányvár [Pagan Fort], because the pagan Székely ancestors are said to have worshiped their god there. The fort - of which there are traces - used to belong to a Lord Sámsond; his people founded the village and named it after him. In the fort there is a cellar full of treasure, sealed tightly by an iron door. Beautiful tündérek [fairies] guard it. But on moonlit noghts they go bathe in the lake at the foot og the hill. Once they forgot to lock the door and a shepherd went inside. He brought out two loads of treasure, but was caught by the tündérek on the third round. The door slammed shut and the shepherd was trapped. He spent seven zears underground and survived bz white rock. Then the door opened and he came out, but was blinded bz the light of the sun. He spent the rest of his dazs a sightless, poor beggar. (Orbán IV, 201)

2. In the year 1826 Michael Weber, a farmer from Bistritz, dreamt that there was a treasure buried in the garden of the Franciscan monastery, guarded by a black priest. Weber told many people about it. Some encouraged him to go dig for it; others, including his wife, begged him not to do so. He finally decided to try it and went out one night before Pentecost. He dug for two hours at the spot he had seen in his dreams - under a lilac bush - without success. He quit, thinking to continue after the holiday. On his way home, at midnight, he stopped to rest on the Saliterraig [Saltpeter Hill], the town's old hanging ground. He fell asleep. In his dream the black priest appeared to him again, and told him: "You have begun the work of my salvation; come now, and finish it!" In the morning, when he did not show up, his wife went looking for him and found him there, badly beaten and scratched up, unconscious. Weber never recovered. He spoke of nothing but the black priest after that and went raving mad. He died five years later, in 1831 (Muller, 129).

A complete treasure legend usually contains three roles in addition to that of the treasure itself: of the owner, the guardian, and the seeker. In the Hungarian example these are, respectively, Lord Sámsond, the "tündérek," and the shepherd; in the German, monks, the black priest, and Michael Weber. Not all roles appear in every legend: belief in the mere existence of a treasure can be a legend, albeit only a fragment.

Applying the statistical method used above to the 78 Hungarian and 56 German treasure legends reveals that thirty Hungarian, but only six German items contain no reference whatever to the supernatural. In several of the remaining, however, the supernatural character is merely incidental: the treasrue neither derives from it, nor is it guarded by it; only the locale is common. There are three such in the German corpus, but ten in the Hungarian. And that leaves 47 (84%) German, but only 38 (49%) Hungarian legends with a supernatural element tied to the treasure.

All of these 47 German legends contain characters that are superstitious, but only 33 of the Hungarian ones do: in four of the latter, the connection is onlz with a muthical owner. In eight German items the character is a spell or a curse only. In others, they are poltergeists (2), a white woman (5), or the ghost of an old man (7) - frightening, but not necessarily evil characters. The rest are demonological and evil: thew black priest (1), black hens, turkeys, water buffaloes, and poodles (mixed, in 13). In contrast, Hungarian treasures are guarded by tündérek (7), a white snake (1), a dragon (1) and numerous spells, as well as spirits without form, which can speak (4). Evil Hungarian are black dwarfs (1), unspecified "evil ones" (1), water buffaloes (1), black or red roosters (3), black goats (1), a fire-spewing white stallion (1), and a magic cat (1). In three cases, Hungarians also mentioned dogs - not poodles, but hounds, one of which, however, was of brass. But what is missing from the Hungarian legends is a mood that the German equivalents evoke: that the treasure itself is evil and its quest sinful.

Theworst that can happen to a Hungarian seeker is that he dies poor anyway; the blinding of the shepherd is unique in this regard. To the Hungarian, only the quest is dangerous. The German, on the other hand, becomes tainted by seeking and touching the Devil's money, and is often ponished horribly for yielding to temptation: he goes insane, is lured to his death, or the curse kills him, even all his kin. There is only a single Hungarian legend with a deadly outcome, in which a group of Romanian treasure hunters is buried by a rockslide. But in this tale an oath had been broken and a murder committed: it is not for seeking treasure that the men are punished by the elements.

Rarely is a quest successful in either set, and if it is, the finder is likely to be a foreigner, in most cases a Romanian. Sometimes, though the quest succeeds, the treasure turns into worthless stones or leaves.

The Germans looked for treasure in their own back yards, the Hungarians out in the mountains. usually near real or imaginary forts. , in caves, springs or wells. Forts are mentionrd in only eight German, but in 45 Hungarian legends. Twenty-six German items list house walls, yards, haylofts, and fields as hiding places; no Hungarian referred to these. Only two German legends place the treasure in water, while 18 Hungarian items do, Of the latter, 11 are bells sunk in wells.

From whom did the hoards derive? Excluding the bells, the Germans mentioned giants (1), a bewitched princess (1), King Darius (2), Turks (2), monks or nuns (2), a prince (1), Attila (1), a knight (1), Prince Apafi (1), and "an old miser". In the rest of the legends the owner is not specified or is only an ordinary farmer or burgher. In contrast, the Hungarians mentioned giants or tündérek 14 times, sometimes naming them (4); but along with the forts comes a list of lords, warriors and heroes, some historical, some legendary (Csombod, Sámsond, Buda, Kadicsa, Tiburc, Bás, Süger, King Salamon, and Zéta). All of them, historical or not, are romantic figures, many of them pagan, dating from a pre-Vhristian period. Even where there are no personal names, other references point to such a pagan past: geographic names: Pogányvár [Pagan Fort] (4), Pogányhavas [Pagan Mountain] (1), B'lv'nyos [Place of Idols] (2). Ancient, non-Christian peoples also apear in the corpus: Dacians (2), Turks (not Ottoman) (5), and Jews (1). In addition, Hungarians also mentioned monks (2), King Darius (2), and a miser (1). Except for the latter, they made no mention of ordinary mortals, save collectively, by villages.

Clearly, the Hungarian legends are more romantic than the German ones. For reasons having to do with their social organization and history, the Transylvanian Saxons had fewer heroes, and those they had they seem not to have associated with treasure. The only legendary figures they name in this connection are the Persian Darius, the Hun Attila, and the Hungarian Apafi. We also note that most of the Hungarian treasures have their origin in a distant, mythical past and not chiefly in superstitions, while with the Germans the reverse is the case.

The figure of King Darius is curious. We do not know how and why Darius came to be associated with Transylvania, but the motif is likely very old. The 19th century preoccupation with it may come from an interesting hoax, however, which the historian László Kőváry recounts: a Hungarian burgher of Kolozsvár (Klausenburg, Cluj-Napoca) nemed Pál Varga, who had suddenly become inexplicably wealthy, was supposed to have found the Darius treasure and left behind a description of it in his last will and testament. This "document", dated July 26, 1765, existed in several "originals". It gave a detailed account of the hoard and instructions on how to reach it. Not only ordinary people were fooled by it; even Steinville, the Austrian governor of the time, sent an expedition to search for it. (4)

I have still not dealt with the bell legends (10 German and 15 Hungarian) that I have counted among the treasure legends. In this, I deviare from the usual practice, which considers bell legends a separate category. Thus a German scholar, Lutz Röhrich, writes (in my translation): "To the Christian layer of legends belong ... also the numerous bell legends: sunken bells peal from the depyhs of the earth or of water. Legends depict the bell itself as a form of supernatural being: it can change its location, it rings by itself, drives away evil spirits, storm and hail." (5) In the two Transylvanian collections, there are only two items in which the above may hold true: one German legend, in which mysterious bells are heard at Christmas, and one Hungarian, in which the bells of a razed village are heard to ring on quiet nights. But in all the rest the bell is more properly an item of buried treasure, for it appears in the same context as treasure. In the typical Saxon version, the bell of a long-destroyedcommune is found by a sow (for the Germans a symbol of luck and prosperity). The Hungarians mentioned a pig only once. In the usual Hungarian version the defenders of a fort or of a village bury their bells or sink them into a well, along with their other valuables, before fleeing; in only two of them are the bells held by a spell. The overall implication is that the bells of Transylvania were esteemed not so much as religious objects, but as objects of material worth. And it is no wonder: the bells were, after all, one of the largest common financial investments - and therefore the pride - of any commune; and since they were sought by every army for gun metal, they were carefully hidden in times of conflict.

In summary, we can perhaps come to certain conclusions about the two groups of carriers. Based on the very limited evidence presented, it appears that the Saxons were more superstitious by far; that in their world view, the superstitious outweighed the mythical; that Christian and Germanic demonology was a dominant influence in their lives; and that they did not identify with Transylvania's "golden age" - logically so, since they were very much conscious of having been invited by the King of Hungary to establish settlements in Transylvania. Their roots lay in Germany, not in the local landscape. The Hungarians, by contrast, revealed far less propensity for superstition. For them, the mythical elements were dominant. Unlike the Saxons, they identified with a legendary, pre-Christian "golden age" in Transylvania, in which they had evolved into a nation. The influence of Christian teaching, of Germanic-Christian demonology on them seems to have been minimal, even though they had been Roman Catholics alon with the Saxons until the Reformation, after which their majority became Calvinist Reformed or Unitarian (the Saxons became Lutherans). As far as legend motifs are concerned, there seems to have been little borrowing between the two groups: the two sets coincide chiefly in the characters of certain magic animals, and little else; but while differences are evidence for a lack of borrowing, one can never be sure of the opposite, i.e., that similarities are alwazs due to borrowing.---

1. Friedrich Müller, "Siebenbürgische Sagen," 2nd. ed. (Wien: Karl Graefer, 1885)

2. Balázs Orbán, "A székely föld leírása történelmi, régészeti, természetrajzi s népismei szempontból" (Pest: by the author, to subscribers, 1868-74). 6 vols. Facsimile reprint in two volumes by Helikon Press and the Union of Hungarian Publishers and Book Distributors, Budapest, 1982.

3. For a detailed discussion of the two collections, see Louis J. Elteto, Supernatural Local Legends of Saxon and Székely Transylvania (Dissert., Louisiana State University,1972).

4. László Kőváry, Száz történelmi rege [One Hundred Historical Legends] (Kolozsvár, 1857), 25-35.

5. Lutz Röhrich, Sagen, Sammlung Metzler, 55 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1966), 35-36.