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The Romanian
In Békés County the settlements of the Orthodox Romanians was continuous from the Turkish ages until the end of the 19th century. Evlia Cselebi, the Turkish traveller wrote about the Romanians in Gyula in the 1660s: "hard-working farmers and diligent, willing people". The settlers were differentiated with their mother tongue, Orthodox religion and the most important elements of their culture. At the same time with their settlements they established the Orthodox Church disregarding some exceptions. Nowadays the Romanian Orthodox Bishopric in Hungary. The chronological order of their establishment is the following: Gyula, Kétegyháza, Méhkerék, Sarkadkeresztúr, Battonya, Békés, Békéscsaba, Pusztaottlaka, Csorvás, Elek, Lökösháza. At the time of settlement Méhkerék was the only village where there were only Romanian inhabitants. They lived with Hungarians in Gyula, Sarkadkeresztúr, Békés and Csorvás, with Hungarians and Serbians in Battonya, with Germans in Elek and with Slovakians in Békéscsaba.
Building churches, establishing and running denominational schools were considered by the Romanian Orthodox Church as an obligation. It became the supporter of secular and religious culture, had outstanding power at all areas of education and also started publishing. Ecclesiastical autonomy and the local government created opportunity in certain boundaries to direct cultural life comprehensively. Belonging to the national minority revealed in insisting on the Orthodox Church and Romanian denominational schools and active cultural clubs, reading, singing and acting circles.
The Romanian communities possessed typical folk culture at the time of settlement and the following one and a half centuries. The traditional peasant culture of the Romanians included originally different elements from Hungarians and other ethnics. The best-known folklores are the folkdances of Elek and Méhkerék, the folktales of Pusztaottlaka, Méhkerék and Kétegyháza and the folk customs of Battonya. A lot of believes are in connection with calendar holidays, such as singing Christmas Carols, hypocrisy in goat masks, doing fertility magic on New Year’s Day, consecration of the house at Epiphany, feast habits at Lent, doing magic on Saint Tudor’s Day, sprinkling on Saint George’s Day, consecration of wheat at Whitsun and predicting on Saint Ivan’s Day. Traditions of family life are also abundant, like magic processes in connection with little children, customs on weddings and folk poetry at funerals. Nowadays a lot of archaic features of suppositions remained, like stories about believed creatures, magic and rational folk treatments.
In object culture the most typical characteristics of the Romanians can be shown the most pregnantly on folk textiles, because its motifs and the special technology of weaving were influenced the least by external effects. Furniture and home objects show only few ethnic features because the Romanian as well obtained their modestly manufactured items from the local masters at the nearby markets. The Romanian style of the house was determined by ornaments, like painted walls, textiles, photographs, icons, arranging the furniture, but not the outlook of furniture. Mostly hairstyle, wearing string of coins, the cut and ornaments of the clothes, using home made materials, the way of wearing headgears and aprons made them different from other ethnics’ costumes.
The identity situation of Romanian communities, living separately and having a two-century-old past, is different by settlements because their history was formed by the historical-cultural features of the given village so they are at different levels of assimilation and losing the language. From all Romanians in Hungary the ones who has lived in Békés County saved their identity for the longest time at the settlements where they moved at the largest number, where they lived with ethnics beside of Hungarians and where they possessed the inevitable facilities, like working church and school, to preserve identity.
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