Jász Erotic

The Jász are Hungarians with an Iranian past they have never quite put down. Their ancestors were Alans, horse-herding people from the steppe north of the Caucasus, who came into the Carpathian Basin in the 1240s alongside the Cumans, pushed west by the Mongols. Béla IV settled them on the flat country between the Zagyva and Tarna rivers northeast of Budapest, and that block of land, the Jászság, is still theirs: a cluster of towns most of which carry the name as a prefix, Jászberény, Jászapáti, Jászárokszállás, Jászfényszaru. Their language went early, gone by the sixteenth century, and what survives of it is one of the stranger scraps in European philology. Around forty words with Latin glosses, written on the back of a 1422 court document, sat unread in the Hungarian national archives until 1957, when someone finally recognized what he was looking at. An Ossetian can read most of the list without help: dan for water, bah for horse, fit for meat, sana for wine. That single page is the entire surviving corpus.

What the Jász commemorate is not a battle but a purchase. They held their land on privileged terms, self-governing and free of serfdom in exchange for mounted service to the crown, until 1702, when Leopold I, short of cash, sold the whole Jász and Cuman district to the Teutonic Order and the free districts woke up as somebody else's property. They litigated for four decades, then bought themselves back, raising half a million forints among their own towns and paying Maria Theresa in 1745 for their liberty. Households that paid in became redemptus and took a share of the common land; those that could not stayed irredemptus, and that line ran through local society for generations. Redemption Day, May 6, is still the date that matters here. They are Roman Catholic and pointedly so, a Catholic block in a stretch of the Great Plain that turned Calvinist around them, their old Cuman partners included. Jász is now a regional identity rather than a nationality: they speak Hungarian and appear on no minority census. They also elect a ceremonial Jász captain, hold a world meeting for those who have scattered, and keep in Jászberény a carved ivory horn of Byzantine work that has served as their emblem for centuries, attached by legend to a tenth century Magyar chieftain who had nothing to do with them. Recent ancient DNA work on medieval graves in the region found what the wordlist already implied: Caucasus ancestry arriving in the thirteenth century, thinning steadily ever since.