Palóc Erotic

The Palóc are Hungarians whom other Hungarians can identify by ear. They live in the hill country of the north: the Cserhát, Mátra and Bükk ranges and the valleys below them, across Nógrád, Heves and Borsod counties in Hungary and over the border into southern Slovakia around Losonc and Rimaszombat. What marks them first is speech. Palóc keeps a short a said with the lips unrounded, where standard Hungarian rounds it, and it still holds the palatal ly apart from plain j, a distinction the rest of the language collapsed generations ago. To a Budapest ear this sounds archaic and rural, and it has been imitated and mocked for two centuries, which has not stopped anyone from speaking it. Where the name came from is unsettled. It looks Slavic, probably tied to the word Slavs used for the Cumans, which has fed long arguments about whether the Palóc descend from Cuman or Kabar groups settled in the frontier hills, or whether they are simply Hungarians who stayed on poor land and kept old habits longer than their neighbors. Nobody has closed the case.

They are overwhelmingly Roman Catholic and stubbornly so: Palócföld is a Catholic block in a part of the country where Calvinism took firm hold in the sixteenth century, and the pilgrimage to the spring at Mátraverebély-Szentkút still draws crowds every year. The region also produced some of the densest embroidery in the Carpathian basin, red and black on white linen, worked by women who were poor by any measure. Kálmán Mikszáth, a Nógrád Palóc himself, published A jó palócok in 1882 and fixed the type in the national imagination: shrewd, hard up, funny, drawn with enough affection to be difficult to shake off since. Two later shocks did more than folklore ever did. The border drawn in 1920 cut the region in half and left the northern villages in Czechoslovakia. Then coal at Salgótarján and iron at Ózd pulled hill farmers into heavy industry for the better part of a century, and when that industry went down after 1989 it left Nógrád among the poorest counties in Hungary, with the young leaving for Budapest and Vienna. Hollókő, on the UNESCO list since 1987 for its preserved street of whitewashed houses with wooden galleries, is a working village of a few hundred people and a very busy Easter. What holds at home now is the accent, the church calendar and the food: palóc soup, which a Budapest restaurateur named after them in Mikszáth's honor, travels better than the people it was named for.