From Toleration to Expulsion: The Families of Ecsény Somogy County, Hungary 1784-1948

By Henry A. Fischer

On April 6, 1948, a significant portion of the population of the village of Ecsny in Somogy County, Hungary, was expelled from their homeland. This was the result of Protocol XIII of the Potsdam Declaration of 1945 calling for the orderly and humane transfer of German populations now living in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary.

The families involved were descendants of German settlers who began to arrive in what would become the village of Ecsny as early as 1754. They formed an Evangelical Lutheran congregation at the outset that would survive as an underground movement until the Edict of Toleration promulgated by the Emperor Joseph II of Austria in 1782.

These two governmental actions taken centuries apart, play pivotal roles in the lives and destinies of the families who would call Ecsny their home. The families that were expelled were sent to the then Russian Zone of Germany from which large numbers later escaped into the American and British Zones. Numerous families were successful in emigrating from there to Canada, the United States, and Australia.

This publication is addressed to their English-speaking descendants, providing them with genealogical information about their forebears. In addition, the families associated with the various affiliated congregations in Hcs, Polny, Rksi, Somodor, and Vmos are included as well as information about the families that emigrated to Slavonia, the United States, and Canada prior to World War II.

There are also introductory articles to assist the reader in having a basic knowledge of the history, lifestyle, and origins of their families. This work is published on the 260th anniversary of the founding of Ecsny.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Jan 30, 2015
• ISBN: 9781496966308

Henry A. Fischer

Henry A. Fischer is the author of several genealogical and historical studies of the descendants of German families that migrated into the Kingdom of Hungary during the early 18th Century. Born in Kitchener, Ontario in Canada, he is a graduate of the University of Western Ontario and Waterloo Lutheran Seminary. Following over forty years in the pastorate he began research on his own family history that led to his career as an author. He is married to his wife Jean, the father of Stephen and David and the grandfather of Julianna, John, Evan and Luke the next generation of the Children of the Danube now transplanted to Canada.

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© 2015 Henry A. Fischer. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 01/29/2015

ISBN: 978-1-4969-6631-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4969-6632-2 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4969-6630-8 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015901600

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Contents

Foreword

Introduction

Ecsény and Its Past

Affiliated Congregations

Emigration

The Second World War and Its Aftermath

Sources

Variations in Names

Places of Origin

A Portrait of Life

Some Research Guidelines

Codes and Symbols

About the Author

Dedicated to the Descendants

of the Families of Ecsény

and its affiliated congregations

Now Dispersed All Over the World

Who Remember and Cherish

Their Heritage

As Children of the Danube

Foreword

Unlike most publications of this nature, From Toleration to Expulsion is addressed to English readers, descendants of families from Ecsény and its affiliated congregations and communities in Somogy County in Hungary.

The forebears of Ecsény’s families were participants in what is now known as the Schwabenzug (Great Swabian Migration) of the 18th Century. They left their various German homelands behind and made their way down the wide majestic Danube River into the Kingdom of Hungary at the invitation of a series of Habsburg rulers to establish a new Heimat (Homeland) for themselves and their families. These families came from numerous parts of what is now south western Germany but primarily from the Duchy of Hessen as the genealogical information this work contains clearly indicates.

They maintained their traditions, faith, language and German identity and developed a unique culture all their own in the centuries that followed. The Hungarians would refer to all of these German settlers and their descendants as Svábok which was a reference to the first German settlers who arrived in Hungary during the first settlement period who just happened to have been Swabians from the Black Forest area. Even though the vast majority of the families in Ecsény were of non-Swabian origin they adopted the term for themselves only pronouncing it in the Hessian manner: Schwova. They did not become Swabians but steadfastly remained being Germans. In their own minds they were Ungarn Deutsche. Germans in Hungary. Hungary’s Germans.

In the 1920s some ethnologist researcher in Vienna assigned the term Donauschwaben (Danube Swabians) to identify the descendants of the German settlers who migrated down the Danube River into Hungary during the 18th Century. That term was totally unfamiliar and virtually unknown to the families in Ecsény nor would they ever identify themselves with it. In order to differentiate this unique branch of the German speaking people in Hungary whose history was vastly different from that of the majority of the so-called Danube Swabians, the author coined the term, Children of the Danube.

For that reason, in this published work, the families of Ecsény are simply identified as being German. It was the language they spoke and the term they would have used in answer to the question of their nationality when asked by their descendants in the United States of America and Canada for whom this work is written and to whom it is dedicated.

Introduction

The title of this work, From Toleration to Expulsion, attempts to capture not only the time frame involved from 1784-1948 as it pertains to the families in Ecsény but the part played by outside forces that were completely beyond their control. There were two major governmental actions and political decisions that were made by the powers that be in Europe that gave birth to the emergence of the Lutheran congregation in Ecsény and later the forced expulsion of a major portion of the village’s population.

The first of these governmental policies that had far reaching effects was the Edict of Toleration which was decreed in Vienna by the Habsburg Emperor Joseph II on January 2, 1782. The Edict granted a measure of religious freedom to non-Roman Catholics in Hungary by granting them the right to form themselves into congregations upon receiving the personal consent of the Emperor. This allowed them to call pastors as well as erect facilities for their religious purposes. But the building could not have a steeple or bells, nor have the outward appearance of a church and could not be located on or face the main street of the community. There were numerous other conditions, hindrances and obligations with which the congregations and the pastors also had to comply.

The Edict or Patent of Toleration was only one of thousands of decrees, Royal Patents, laws and enactments that flowed freely from the reactionary Emperor’s fertile mind and pen in his attempt to put the aims of the 18th Century Enlightenment into effect in his realm. All of his attempts at reform were met with stiff resistance from vested interests in both Church and State and resulted in numerous setbacks if not political disasters for him so that in the end the Royal Revolutionary as Joseph II was called, completely despaired of his life’s work on his deathbed and repudiated all of them~except for one.

That one exception was the Edict of Toleration which rescued the Protestants in his Empire from the death grip of the centuries-old machinations of the Counter Reformation and hundreds of underground Lutheran and Reformed congregations emerged overnight all across Hungary. Ecsény was one of them.

German Lutheran settlers first appeared in what would in future become Ecsény around 1754. They were primarily Hessians who had first settled in neighbouring Tolna County although there were also families from Württemberg and the Rhine Palatinate. Many of them had been born in Hungary while a few of the families had recently come from one of the German principalities along the Rhine. At the outset they formed themselves into a Lutheran congregation and one of the settlers acted as the Levite Lehrer, teaching the children and acting as the lay worship leader. His identity remains unknown to us and there were probably several others who succeeded him in the next two decades.

Representatives from Ecsény joined a delegation of Lutherans from nearby Kötcse and Somogydöröcske who went to Vienna and sought an audience with the Empress Maria Theresia which was granted to them on May 7, 1775. They presented the Empress with a petition for permission to call a theologically trained Levite Lehrer to serve in each of their congregations. This document is in the Royal Imperial Archives in Vienna and indicates that at that time there were 416 Lutherans living in the village of Ecsény. Regretfully they were unsuccessful in securing the Empress’ approval of their request.

Despite the fierce opposition of both the Vatican in Rome and the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church in Hungary the Edict of Toleration was implemented in 1784. Ecsény was the first of the underground Lutheran congregations in Somogy County that received royal approval to officially organize themselves and call a pastor as one of the "Tolerance Churches" that now began to spring up all over Hungary.

The first entry made in the Church Records in Ecsény by the first pastor to serve the congregation, Sebastian Samuel Ratkoczy, is the death of four month old Heinrich Krein on August 26, 1784. Unfortunately the names of his parents are omitted. That is how the documented story of the families of Ecsény begins.

Following the end of the Second World War, three men met at Potsdam just outside of Berlin in the summer of 1945 in the Cecilienhof Palace. To history they would become known as The Big Three. They were Winston S. Churchill, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Harry S. Truman, the President of the United States of America, and Generalissimo Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union. Part way through their deliberations Clement Atlee became the new British Prime Minister and replaced Churchill. The victorious Allied Powers met in Potsdam to redraw the map of Europe and establish borders that would forever prevent the re-emergence of Germany as a major political and military power. Included in their agenda was the question of what to do about the 15,000,000 Germans living outside of the territory of Germany that were considered to pose an ongoing problem for their host countries.

These discussions would result in the Potsdam Declaration issued on August 2, 1945. Protocol XIII of the Declaration is subtitled, Orderly Transfer of German Populations. It states the following, "The three governments having considered the question in all of its aspects, recognize that the transfer to Germany of German populations, or elements thereof remaining in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary will have to be undertaken. They agree that the transfer that takes place should be effected in an orderly and humane manner…" This orderly and humane transfer would cost the lives of 2,000,000 of those who were to be effected. On the basis of the current United Nations’ Declaration on Human Rights this action taken at Potsdam would now be considered a crime against humanity.

The expulsion of the German population in Hungary began to take effect on January 4, 1946. Initially it began in the numerous German villages and enclaves around Budapest as well as western Hungary along the Austrian frontier which involved the Heidebauern who were descendants of Bavarian and Franconian peasant families who had been settled there by Charlemagne in the 10th Century and had lived in Hungary prior to the coming of the nomadic Magyar tribes. The first 180,000 German expellees from Hungary were deported to the American Zone of Occupation in Germany. When the American Army officials became aware of how the expulsions were being carried out and saw the sorry state of affairs in which the destitute expellees arrived they protested to their military mission in Budapest.

No response was forthcoming from Hungarian officials and as a result the Americans took action and refused to accept any more deportees from Hungary and closed their borders to them. The Soviets stepped in at this point and arranged for the next 50,000 expellees to be sent to the Russian Zone of Occupation in Germany primarily the State of Saxony. This would become the destination of the expellees from Swabian Turkey, from the Counties of Baranya, Tolna and Somogy.

The final round of expulsions began to take place late in 1947 and ended in the early summer of 1948. It is described in the following way in the entry for April 6, 1948 in the daily diary of Pastor Eduard Berkényi in Ecsény: "Today will be remembered as the blackest day in the history of our community and congregation. Two hundred and eighty persons from the Mother Church here in Ecsény and forty persons from our affiliated congregations were expelled…"

Their fate and destination were unknown to them at the time. Those involved consisted primarily of women and children, teenagers, the elderly and middle aged men. The criteria to determine which families or individuals were to be expelled were inconsistent and arbitrary and determined at the whim of regional Hungarian Communist officials. Concurrently, Hungarian expellees from Czechoslovakia arrived and took over the homes and properties of those whose names were on the expulsion list that had been posted on the bulletin board of the Kulturhaus (House of Culture).

The expellees were taken by horse and wagon to the railway station in nearby Bonnya and passed through that nearly deserted village on their way there. Almost the entire German population of Bonnya were also expelled and had preceded them to the railway depot where they were joined by families from Somogydöröcske and Gadács as well as some of the German Roman Catholic villages in the area. Here they were all packed into cattle cars. There were 2,500 persons in this first convoy from Somogy County that left that night and headed out into the unknown. Huddled in the darkness of the cattle cars the expellees began to sing, "Wer Nur Den Lieben Gott Lässt Walten. (If You But Trust in God to Guide You".) The story of the families of Ecsény ends just as it began along the banks of the Danube River at Regensburg when the Hessians who would found the village of Kötcse left for an unknown future in Hungary in the Spring of 1723 and had the same hymn on their lips and with steadfast faith in their hearts.

Prior to the expulsion, countless families that had been dispossessed of their homes and properties had been forced to seek a future elsewhere and in the years which followed there was a further decline in the village population after the collectivization of the land and farms had taken place. A major portion of them sought a better life in the nearby towns, especially in Kaposvár, Igal and Tab. The younger generation no longer spoke the language of their parents and grandparents and were intent on being assimilated. Most of them left; the school was closed and more and more colonists moved in. Today there is only a small remnant of German Lutherans in the present day village almost all of whom are elderly and number less than forty out of a current population of 214 (according to the 2014 Census).

Many of the houses have been abandoned and are in ruins and bear mute testimony to what had once been a thriving community and the Heimat that had been dear to the hearts of those who once called it their home. The tall cream coloured baroque church that stands in the centre of the village is a silent witness to the faith that sustained and nurtured the families of Ecsény in their sojourn in Hungary…from toleration to expulsion.

Ecsény and Its Past

For most of recorded history the forests, hills and meadows that would become the site of the village of Ecsény were rather isolated and remained untouched by the outside world. The dense forests, steep hills, deep ravines and the rich golden clay soil upon which future settlements would rise and fall would become home to a variety of peoples.

Near the close of 12th Century, a County Chronicle mentions the existence of a community here that was called Puszta Athachim. In that year, King Bela III of Hungary, made it part of a land grant to a monastic order, the Knights of St. John. There were also Paulist Fathers who received landholdings in the area as well as some lesser nobles. In later records, such as one from 1357 it is referred to as Echen. By 1470 it had become Echyn. In future it would become Ecsény.

During the 15th Century, the Order of the Knights of St. John owned one portion of the present village site. Meanwhile the Keri family held title to the area that in future would be known as Lower Ecsény or Unner Etsch as it was called by its later German inhabitants. In 1478 these lands changed hands as the Keri brothers ceded their holdings to the Perneszi family. Two years later we discover that the Fajsi family are the owners of the whole area which they in turn donated to the Paulist Fathers of Toldi.

Following the disastrous defeat of the Hungarians by the Turks at the Battle of Mohács in 1526 this entire area in Somogy County underwent a virtual bloodbath and experienced total destruction at their hands. Freebooters roamed the countryside as well as slave traders. The local population fled, were massacred, carried off into slavery or went into hiding. The Turkish Tax List for 1573-1574 records the presence of seven households in the village. In 1580 there were eight. After that nothing more was reported of a local population. The wilderness once more encroached on what had once been cultivated land. Fugitives, brigands, hunters and adventurous travellers may have passed through. The area was now simply cut off from the rest of Western Civilization.

At the beginning of the 18th Century the Perneszi nobles still included the area among their landholdings and family estates. The Counties of Tolna, Baranya and Somogy which in future would collectively become known as Swabian Turkey were now freed from Turkish occupation. The rebuilding, redevelopment and resettlement of this vast devastated area was now underway. But little or no resettlement took place on the Perneszi Domain and their landholdings in Somogy County.

In 1733 the family either lost their rights or gave up their claims to their former estates. This could have been due to the Neo Acquistica Commission in Vienna which attempted to confiscate as much Hungarian owned land as possible from the Hungarian nobles and grant or deed it to more reliable allies of the Habsburgs.

One document from 1776 indicates that the Puszta (prairie) was owned jointly by a number of individuals including Gabriel Adeligen, Anton Tallion, Alexander Szelestry and Julianna Rosthy as well as some others. In 1785 we find that Joseph Horváth is the sole owner. Paul Tallion would have the largest share of the landholdings after 1856. His later descendants always displayed a rather condescending attitude towards their German tenants. They sold parcels of land to them rather begrudgingly and did so in small plots to increase the price.

The arrival of the first German Lutheran settlers in Ecsény is rather uncertain. There is a long standing tradition that twenty-five German Lutheran families pioneered here around 1754. The history of the Tolna, Baranya and Somogy District of the Lutheran Church in Hungary indicates that by the year 1759-1760 there were twenty-five families from Tolna and Baranya Counties who had settled in Ecsény. They were unable to form a congregation of their own and became an affiliate of the Slovak Lutheran Church in Tab. But this was not officially recognized by the County which placed them under the spiritual jurisdiction of the Roman Catholic priest in Barapati where a few entries in the Church Records deal with Lutheran families in Ecsény.

That settlement took place in this timeframe is pretty certain but where the settlers came from is far less certain. There appears to be a link with Somogydöröcske which the early settlers saw as the mother of their own community and that is attested to by the ongoing intermarriages between the two villages. The Hessian dialect that was spoken in Ecsény bears a very close resemblance to that of the villages of Izmény, Kismányok and Majos in Tolna County. But there were other settlers who came from much closer to home. They were young families from the older settlement of Kötcse to the north who were among them and the family connections with that community remained strong both in the time of settlement and in its later development. They would include familiar family names like Bruder, Reichert, May, Wiandt, Landek, Ferber and Wolf.

There appear to have been two waves of settlement, the second of which was much larger and is associated with the 1770s and 1780s and may be linked to the third phase of the Schwabenzug carried out under the auspices of Joseph II that included large numbers of Protestants. From the Nagyszékely Church Records in Tolna County we learn that Heinrich Eckhardt, a widower, originally from Neudorf, Hessen and who was living in Ecsény went there to marry on April 16, 1777. It is the earliest documentation we have of an actual individual who had settled in Ecsény. As mentioned elsewhere there was also a representative from Ecsény who accompanied the delegation that had an audience with Empress Maria Theresia on May 7, 1775. In the petition that was presented to her there is the notation that there were already 416 Lutherans living in Ecsény at that time.

When the early settlers arrived there were still some ruins of an old church. The area was a vast open Puszta surrounded by dense forests. There were signs of old abandoned vineyards and cultivated fields and remnants of destroyed villages. During the early years and for decades afterwards few acres of land were actually cultivated because of the need to clear the heavily forested hills and valleys. According to a map of the village dated 1783, the village already had its basic form consisting of Upper, Middle and Lower Ecsény lying in a valley surrounded on all sides by deep impregnable forests. As one commentator who had visited the settlement commented it was not much to look at and rather sorrowful to behold. Life here was rough and rugged. But despite that it had become the Heimat of those who had ventured there and worked tirelessly to make it a thriving community both for themselves and their children in the future.

Affiliated Congregations

Polány

There was a settled community on the current site of Polány at the beginning of the 13th Century when it was incorporated within the Domains of the Cathedral Chapter of the Bishopric of Stuhlweissenburg, the ancient town where the kings of Hungary resided and were crowned. The village manages to emerge out of the mists of medieval history in the 14th Century when it is included in the Vatican’s list of parishes in the Kingdom of Hungary which had its own resident priest. While in the 15th Century there is a further reference to the community but it is now identified as "Farkpolyán."

As a result of Valentine Török’s participation in the Turkish wars that were fought in the first half of the 16th Century and his outstanding valour in battle, he was recognized and feted as a national war hero throughout all of Hungary. For his services to the nation he was awarded a sizeable land grant in 1536 that incorporated vast landholdings in Somogy County which included the village of Polány. He became the richest aristocrat in all of Hungary but his military career continued to take precedence over everything else. In the midst of his retreat from a losing battle he was captured by the Turks and incarcerated in the Seven Towers of Istanbul, the most horrendous prison in the arsenal of the Sultan where he died rather ignominiously some years later in 1551. In the interim, the village of Polány and its population suffered the same fate as all of its neighbouring communities when the Turks occupied, ravaged and practically depopulated Somogy County. There is no evidence available to indicate whether or not there were any inhabitants left in the community at the time of the arrival of the Habsburg forces in the late 17th Century when the Turks were driven out of this part of Hungary.

At the beginning of the 18th Century the lands and estates in the area were sold to Count Franz Niczky of Reichstadt from the present day state of Burgenland in Austria. Polány would remain in the possession of his family until later in the century when Anton Mille purchased it as well as some of the adjacent landholdings. Historians are aware of several attempts that were made to settle the village in the early part of the 18th Century but they were all without success. It was still uninhabited as late as 1720. There is no indication when the first Hungarian serfs were brought there or where they had resided previously. In all probability they came from the Count’s Austrian landholdings.

The first known migration of German Lutheran families into the area was in 1723 when some Hessians were settled in Felsö Mocsolád. They were later joined by more Hessians and a few families from Württemberg who established themselves in nearby Bonnya. In April 1730 Jakob Becht arrived in Bonnya and would serve there secretly as their Levite Lehrer. During the 1750s landless young German Lutheran couples from Tolna County began to put in an appearance as harvesters each autumn on the estates and domains of several nobles and monastic orders in the area. Afterwards they returned to their former homes until such time as some of them were allowed to settle and take up land in what is now called Ecsény. In future these settlers and their descendants would form a small German Lutheran island in a larger Hungarian Roman Catholic sea.

Local Hungarian historians suggest the first German Lutheran settlers arrived in Polány around 1780 and came from Keszöhidegkút in Tolna County and Somogydöröcske in Somogy County. Because of Polány’s relative proximity to Ecsény it would eventually become Ecsény’s closest affiliate. The makeup of Polány’s future German population, its character and ethos would be decidedly different from that of the older and larger village. This was most noticeable in the blended dialect which they spoke.

The Church Records in Ecsény give us a glimpse of the first families who joined in the migration into this once entirely Hungarian Roman Catholic village. The earliest entry in the Church Records involving a German Lutheran family living in Polány is the baptism of Elisabeth, daughter of Johannes Koch and his wife Eva Dorothea Nethling, on October 22, 1809. Young Johannes Koch had come to Ecsény from Kaláznó in Tolna County in order to marry Eva Dorothea who had been born in Varsád but the Nethling family had migrated to Ecsény when she was still quite young. The Koch’s first three children were born in Ecsény before they ventured farther afield to Polány and yet in another sense they still remained in the same general neighbourhood as Eva’s family.

On June 3, 1810 the marriage of Theophile Meissner of Polány and Reinhard Gärtner, who came from an undetermined locale somewhere in Baranya County, took place. She had been born in Somogydöröcske but was now living in Polány along with her parents who had settled there earlier and had probably preceded the arrival of the Kochs.

In the next decade a few more families moved into the village. Johannes Klein arrived in 1812 from Udvári; Johann Heinrich Göbel from Kötsce settled here in 1816 followed by Johannes Burckhardt of Ecsény in 1817. What all of these settlers had in common besides their nationality and religion was the fact that they were newly married couples, a description that would generally be true of most of the settlers who would follow them. In most cases, the men were younger sons who were ineligible to inherit any of the family property or landholdings. The right of inheritance was limited to the oldest son of the family and the other siblings would have to fend for themselves as day labourers, servants, hired hands, tradesmen or seek opportunities elsewhere.

In the 1820s twenty more families settled in the community. It was during this decade that they formed a Lutheran congregation and became an affiliate of Ecsény that would result in the arrival of Paul Rohrer from Nikla as their first Lutheran schoolmaster in 1828. He would be succeeded by Johann Roth in 1845 while his successor in turn would be Heinrich Häusser who would be installed in 1864. By 1870 there were over one hundred and forty German Lutheran families living in the community and both a church and schoolhouse had been built.

A good proportion of the families came from Somogy County primarily from Ecsény and Somogydöröcske as well as a family or two from Bonnya, Kötcse, Gadács, Hács, Ráksi and Vámos. On the other hand, there were sixty families from Tolna County: fifteen from Szárázd; twelve from Nagyszékely; eight families from Udvári and a family or two from Keszöhidegkút, Belécska, Morágy, Kaláznó, Györköny, Felsö Nana and Gyönk. In addition there were also six families from Baranya County: three from Csikostöttös, two from Mekényes and one from Magyarbóly. Added to this mix were three families from Lajoskomárom in Veszprém County and even one family from as far away as Pusztavám in Fejér County. What these four families had in common along with the family from Györköny was the fact they were Heidebauern, descendants of Bavarian and Franconian peasant farmers that Charlemagne had settled in western Hungary in the latter part of the 10th Century. Over the centuries they had maintained their traditions and developed a culture all their own and spoke a distinctive dialect unlike that of their new neighbours in Polány. What they did share with them was their common Lutheran faith. In addition there was a family from Berlin and another from Württemberg. Each in their own way added to the distinctive flavour and character of this unique German community that saw additional families continue to migrate there even as some of the young families once again began to leave in search of greener pastures elsewhere, at first in Slavonia and then later in North America.

Vámos

Like some kind of vigilant sentinel the ruins of a 15th Century Romanesque church and its immense tower stands guard in the middle of the broad fertile valley surrounded by the cultivated fields of the village of Vámos now called Somogyvámos to differentiate it from a village of the same name in another County. Located some 25 kilometres north of Kapsovár and 12 kilometres northwest of Ecsény the village’s origin had its beginnings as a community during the occupation of the region by the warlike Avar tribe in the 6th and 7th Centuries. The first written record of its existence during the Middle Ages was in 1237 when it was identified as Csopaic and was then part of the Domains of the Abbey of Széntmárton and its monastic community, who in all likelihood were the builders of the imposing cathedral-like structure that was left in ruins by the Turks who went on a rampage of destruction throughout the area after the defeat of the Hungarians at the Battle of Mohács in 1526. The County chronicles also indicate that most of the villages in the area including Vámos were put to the torch at that time.

During the Turkish occupation of Somogy County the population was virtually wiped out, enslaved, fled as refugees to western Hungary or eked out a living in isolated groups far removed from areas where the Turkish presence was concentrated. In 1687 just prior to the liberation of Somogy County the Turks compiled a comprehensive Tax Assessment List of the inhabited communities that were still in existence at that time and we find that Vámos is identified as being one of them. It boasted a population of five households, the majority of whom were Serbs.

The curved slopes leading down into the valley, the village itself, the lush meadows and forests were owned by a succession of nobles both before and after the Turkish conquest. Included among them was the 16th Century military hero Lászlo Gyulaffy. Later a succession of noble families was given the landholdings as payment in lieu of war debts that had been incurred by the Habsburgs. In the 18th Century the village was part of the Domains of Count Niczky and then later it was purchased by the Jankovics family. They were Slovaks and members of the lesser nobility. Later in 1856 the village and its landholdings came into the possession of Vinzenz Kund. It was during the period when the Jankovics family were the landlords that the first German Lutheran settlers arrived following an extensive earlier settlement that had already been undertaken by Hungarian serfs brought there from Vas and Tolna Counties.

Two major fires almost destroyed the entire village. The first, in 1867 and the second in 1901 but neither the Roman Catholic Church that served the Hungarian population nor the Lutheran Church built by the later arriving Germans were very badly damaged. In its heyday the population of the village reached 800 of whom about 250 were Germans.

Over the years two adjoining Pusztas were added to the village’s landholdings and this would prove instrumental in attracting new settlers. The German Lutheran settlers who arrived signed individual contracts with the local Jankovics’ authorities who acted on the family’s behalf. The terms are not known to us but they must have been more favourable than the situation in which they found themselves.

No local Hungarian historian or researcher has attempted to account for the coming of the German Lutheran families to Vámos or attempted to estimate when this migration took place. We do know that the reason as always was the search for new land to enable young families to ensure a better future for themselves and their children. How this all began in Vámos unfolds for us in the Church Records in Ecsény.

It appears that young twenty-year-old Johannes Weber came to Ecsény from Tengöd a settlement just to the south of Tab and courted and won the hand of eighteen-year-old Margareta Katharina Burckhardt. They were married in Ecsény on January 16. 1810 and the birth of their daughter Anna Margareta took place close to that year’s end in Vámos. That was the genesis of the German Lutheran community in the village. During that decade they were joined by Johannes Reith who too had come courting to Ecsény but from Felsö Nana in Tolna County and married Katharina Lotz. After a few years of living in nearby Felsö Mocsolád they moved on to Vámos in the spring of 1813 along with Johannes Bucholz who had also come to Ecsény but from Kötcse in search of a wife a few years previously and had married Katharina Flick.

Johannes Heitzenräder of Ecseny just recently married to Elisabeth Bartholomai from Udvári followed the others to Vámos in 1815. Following their marriage young Jakob Buchenauer of Ecsény and his wife Anna Maria Klein left for Vámos in 1816. In the next two years they were followed by the families of Johann Peter Mechwardt, Jakob Rofrits, Heinrich Gerk, Martin Landek and Jakob Nethling who were all from Ecsény.

This first decade that saw the arrival of eleven German Lutheran families set the pattern for the future. They were mostly young newlyweds or young families from Ecsény that would maintain close family ties with their home community primarily through marriage.

The 1820s witnessed the arrival of seventeen additional families from among whom fourteen came from Ecsény and one each from Udvári, Kötcse and Gyönk. The 1830s repeated the same pattern. Of the twenty-three new families that arrived, fourteen came from Ecsény and three families came from Felsö Mocsolád, one from Kötcse and one from Somogydöröcske which were all located in Somogy County. Only three families arrived from Tolna County. They came from the villages of Nagyszékely, Varsád and Keszöhidegkút. An additional family came from Tofü in Baranya County. The 1840s saw the arrival of thirty-six more families, twenty-seven of whom came from Ecsény. Five other families came from villages in Somogy County: Polány, Gadács, Kötcse, Toponár and Somogydöröcske. The remaining families came from Kaláznó and Varsád in Tolna County and Csikostöttös and Tarrós in Baranya County.

The 1850s welcomed twenty-one more German Lutheran families. Fifteen of them once again came from Ecsény. There was also a family from Bonnya and Somogydöröcske from Somogy County. There were three families from villages in Tolna County: Gyönk, Beléscka and Keszöhidegkút. There was also one that arrived from Nagyág in Baranya County. A total of thirty new families arrived in the 1860s. Twenty-two were from Ecsény and one family from Polány and another from Kötsce in Somogy County. The other families came from villages in Tolna County, two from Keszöhidegkút, and one from Murga, Varsád and Belécska.

Unlike the other affiliates, Vámos was overwhelmingly an extension of the families from Ecsény and would retain that basic characteristic throughout the village’s history.

Although it is difficult to determine when the families in Vámos formed themselves into a Lutheran congregation, the parish records in Ecsény indicate that Konrad Löbl was the Lutheran schoolmaster there in 1835 but he had probably arrived much earlier. As was true of the Levite Lehrers of the past he would also act as the lay worship leader and the first services would have been held in the school that had been erected before his arrival. He was succeeded by Jakob Ritzeld in 1844 and then Josef Kring served the congregation beginning in 1859 shortly before the Lutheran Church was built in 1860.

The pastor in Ecsény held services in Vámos four times a year and celebrated Holy Communion on those occasions. The schoolmaster performed baptisms and conducted funerals. On the occasion of a wedding the families were responsible for bringing the pastor to Vámos and taking him back home to Ecsény afterwards. All of the affiliates paid a portion of the pastor’s salary, usually in kind. In terms of Vámos, each family was assessed on the basis on their ability to pay which could be anywhere from two chickens a year, or a day’s work in the pastor’s vineyard in Ecsény, a sack of wheat or flour, oats or barley. On occasion a calf or piglet, a pair of geese or ducks.

Hács

Baron Ferdinand von Fechtig, a renowned Austrian jurist and member of the Privy Council in Vienna, was the owner of the Domain associated with Lengyeltóti, a town which lies some fifteen kilometres south of Lake Balaton. Here he introduced the Gidran Arabian breed of horses from Egypt on his estate in 1816 and eventually bred a herd of over 300 while also raising 400 cattle and 12,000 sheep. His vast landholdings also included large tracts of uncultivated land as well as meadows overgrown with underbrush and dense forests that he sought to develop agriculturally.

His sights were set on developing the sprawling, hilly and heavily forested Hács Puszta and his recruiting agents were successful in attracting German Roman Catholic settlers whose dialect indicated that they were of Bavarian origin. These original families signed contracts with the Baron on December 1, 1828 outlining the rights and duties of both parties, the terms of which would be in effect for all future settlers. In the decades which followed a steady stream of German Lutheran families settled on the estate. They came primarily from the Hessian villages in Tolna County as well as from the nearby German Lutheran villages in north eastern Somogy County.

This small wave of settlers was symptomatic of the times as landless and young families sought to improve their economic situation as land ran out in the older settlements or became so expensive that it was beyond their means. The Baron promised them the opportunity to get their own land but as always there were strings attached. The settlers were given a house lot and a Joch (1.6 acres) of land for a garden but they had to build their own houses and other farm buildings. For that purpose they could use the lumber and timber that they harvested in clearing the Baron’s forested land. The houses that they built had to meet the required specifications that were set out by the Baron.

From the day the settler signed the contract he was also given a lease on one Joch of forested land that had to be cleared in the first year. He was permitted to farm this acreage for six years but then it would revert back to the ownership of the Domain. At that time he would be given another Joch of forested land to clear and cultivate for six years as before but once again it reverted back to the ownership of the Domain. In this way the Baron had his land cleared to carry out his own agricultural pursuits.

But in addition, the settler was also given another Joch of land to clear for the planting of a vineyard that would not revert back to the Domain but would be leased by the settler and could be passed on to his heir. The settlers were also given grazing rights on the pasture lands of the Domain. Each settler was allowed to pasture one cow and two pigs in the Baron’s meadows. Added to all of these rights and privileges the settler also had to provide 36 working days of free labour from sun up to sun down to the Domain annually usually during the ploughing, seeding and harvesting seasons.

It is obvious that only poverty and desperation could have driven these families to sign such a contract not to mention the backbreaking work that it would demand of them. In many cases these families had been in Hungary for three or four generations and yet here they were still engaged in the work of pioneers and had to contend with the hazards and primitive conditions and privations that were part and parcel of it. Yet in this process they changed the local landscape and eventually a thriving community would emerge.

The Fechtig family sold the Domain to Count Zichy in 1860 and the last of his heirs, Count Béla Zichy, who remained a bachelor throughout his lifetime, parcelled out sections of his estate and sold them after the First World War. The buyers paid off their debt by instalments over a twenty year period. Portions of the remaining forests were also sold at that time. According to the census of 1910 one third of the population identified themselves as being German.

At what point the Lutherans organized and formed themselves into a congregation is not recorded but the families began to relate to the pastor of the church in Ecsény as early as 1831. It would become an affiliate of Ecsény in the 1830s and the worship services were conducted by a series of schoolmasters assigned to them by the regional Seniorat (Lutheran Church District). In 1855 they dedicated their Bethaus (prayer house) that also served as their school.

The Church Records of the Mother Church in Ecsény identify the twenty-nine German Lutheran families that settled in Hács in the first decade after the Puszta was opened for settlement in 1828. The first of the families to arrive was that of Johann Adam Kollepp from Gyönk in Tolna County whose name first appears in an entry in the Parish Records in 1831. This family was followed by two others who arrived from Tolna County in 1832, Johann Wilhelm März from Szárázd and Gottfried Kehl from Keszöhidegkút. In the following year they were joined by Johann Adam Raab and his family from Csikostöttös in Baranya County.

The additional families that arrived during that decade came from various communities in Tolna County: Varsád, Kéty, Udvári, Belécska, Nagyszékely and Murga. There were also two families from Baranya County: Egyházaskosár and Mekényes. Strangely enough only two families came from within Somogy County itself: Johann Kubik from Ecsény and Johann Gärtner from Bonnya with both of them arriving in 1839. Of special significance during this first decade of settlement was the arrival of Johannes Weiss from Kéty who was the first Lutheran schoolmaster sent to serve this fledgling congregation out on the isolated open prairie and deep forests of Hács.

During the decade of the forties there were an additional thirty-six new families that settled in Hács. Only this time there were more families from Somogy County including some from Somogydöröcske, Gadács, Kötcse, Ecsény and even distant Bárcs. But the majority once again were families from some of the same communities in Tolna County with