People of the Puszta [antikvár]

CHAPTER ONE Taking bearings. A puszta in Transdanubia. The character of the inhabitants I was bora and bred in the country, but for a long time I knew scarcely any more about village life than if I had been a city child. The world and mentality of the peasants was known to me only by hearsay. I was born on a puszta and lived there until my teens. The Hungarian word puszta does not refer only to the romantic wide-open stretches of endless steppe re-echoing to the thunder of Petofi's steeds.* In Transdanubia, which lies west of the Danube, the word has no such connotation, for the simple reason that this type of land does not exist there. West of the Danube, puszta means the whole conglomeration of farm servants' dwellings, stables, sheds and granaries built in the middle of a large estate and often reaching the size of a village. This cannot be called a tanya,** for a tanya contains one or two families only, while the puszta frequently shelters one or two hundred families. The puszta has a school and church, or at least a chapel which is usually attached to one wing of the manor-house. So there is a manor-house also, in the middle of an extensive and delightful park, with its tennis-court, artificial lake, orchard and majestic avenues of trees. * Sándor Petőfi (1823-1849) sang the praises of the Great Plain in many of his best-known lyric poems. ¦¦ Tanya is an isolated farmstead typical of the Great Plain, where villages are infrequent.