Matyó Erotic

The Matyó are Hungarians and have never claimed to be anything else. What sets them apart is a small stretch of country where the northern edge of the Great Hungarian Plain meets the southern foot of the Bükk hills. They also have a style of dress and needlework so recognizable that it often stands in for Hungarian folk art as a whole. Their heartland is the town of Mezőkövesd and the nearby villages of Tard and Szentistván, together called Matyóföld. The name is usually traced to Mátyás, the Hungarian form of Matthias. A local story ties it to King Matthias Corvinus, but that story is easier to repeat than to prove.

Religion drew the boundary. The Matyó stayed Roman Catholic in a district where many neighboring communities were Reformed Protestant, and for generations they tended to marry within their own community. That kept the group close and its customs self-reinforcing. Church feasts, weddings and funerals set the calendar for what people wore, and the parish stayed at the center of social life well into the twentieth century.

The Matyó rose

Outsiders mostly know the Matyó through their embroidery. Its signature is a stylized rose, packed together with other blooms and leaves into dense fields of red, pink, blue, green and yellow. Early work was sparer and used fewer colors. Over the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the patterns grew larger, brighter and more crowded, spreading from bed linen onto aprons, shirt sleeves and shawls. Designs were drawn onto the cloth by specialist pattern drawers, each called an íróasszony, or writing woman, and then stitched. Kis Jankó Bori of Mezőkövesd is remembered as the most celebrated of them. A local legend explains all those flowers: the devil seized a young man and demanded an apron full of blossoms as ransom, and because it was winter, his sweetheart embroidered them. In 2012 UNESCO added the folk art of the Matyó to its list of intangible cultural heritage.

The finery grew out of hard lives. Land was scarce for ordinary families around Mezőkövesd, and many Matyó spent their summers as hired harvest hands on distant estates. As the style caught on across Hungary, embroidery became a real source of cash. Today the Matyó live much like other Hungarians of the northeast. The costume still comes out for festivals, folk dance groups and church occasions, and craftspeople keep drawing and stitching the roses by hand.