The Settlement of Gyönk After the Turkish
Occupation
Contributed by
Henry Fischer
In
the year 1699, some officials of a County Commission indicated that
Serbs had occupied the estates of Kety, Gyönk and Tabod, plus some
others for some time. The landowner was Gergely Szili, and even
during the Turkish occupation he raised taxes from his peasants.
These lands came into the possession of Istvan Sandor whose first
wife was Szili’s daughter Eva. The Sandor family lived in Komarom,
and placed Istvan Szekeli in charge of the estates on their behalf
and gave him full power and control over them. The Szekelis had a
small estate along with their manor house in Simontornya and owned
the prairie known as Varsad around 1700. Istvan Sandor already died
in 1700. His heir Istvan Sandor junior and his sister Judith, both
married into the Peter Magyari-Kossa family, who was the Reformed
Superintendent (Bishop) for the Upper Danube Region. In 1702 the
value of the undeveloped estate was put at 12,000 Gulden.
In 1703, Gyönk was inhabited by
sixteen Hungarian families, which however, fled from the area during
the war years of the Kurucz Rebellion under Rákóczi. Only one of
their names would later appear in the taxation lists: Andras
Bölocsfödi. In 1715 there were several other families identified:
Bosnyak, Irsai and Safar. The Royal Chamber official in
Simontornya, Johann Kaufmann was ordered to carry out a conscription
survey of the village of Gyönk and its environs for the government
in Ofen (Buda). This document provides a description of the tilled
land, meadows, and pastures and forests, and the very small number
of inhabitants. In this survey there were six registered Hungarian
families living in Gyönk. All of them had cows, calves and five
families had either oxen or horses in their possession. Later in
1715, one of the families left.
With regard to these early years of
settlement our chief sources are the history of the Tolna Lutheran
Seniorat, written by György Barany Szencize, its first Senior, who
wrote it in 1742, as well as some entries in the Protocols (Minutes)
of Tolna County. According to Barany, Lutherans lived scattered in
the area among Roman Catholics and Reformed when they first settled
there as a group from Papa in Veszprem County, on what would later
become the estate of Gyönk. In an effort to avoid conversion with
the other confessions, they sought sanctuary in the forest, and
lived as hunters, rather than farmers. They approached the
Inspector of the region in Buda for permission to install a Lutheran
pastor to serve them. As a result they issued a call to Andras
Molitoris, the former pastor of the Lutheran congregation in
Varpolata, who in coming to Gyönk was also accompanied by several
other Lutheran families. The scattered Lutherans in the area now
streamed into Gyönk to worship there, which greatly disturbed the
Roman Catholic priesthood in the area.
Consequently, on September 17, 1715
during the general assembly of the County, the priest in Pincehely
complained that a group of Lutherans had settled in Gyönk recently
and had installed their own preacher. He protested against this in
the name of the cathedral chapter in Pecs, and the vicar-general and
challenged the assembly to order the expulsion of the preacher. The
assembly ordered, Johann Kaufmann, the authority who was in charge
of the village to see to Molitoris’ exile, upon his return home to
Gyönk. Because the calling of a pastor had been done with the full
knowledge of Kaufmann, it was probably the reason why he did nothing
about it, so that on April 2, 1716 there was another complaint
lodged at the County Assembly because the expulsion had not been
carried out. This time the vice-governor was charged with the task,
which was also proved rather tardy in his response. According to
Barany’s report, in 1717 Molitoris was forbidden to carry out any
religious functions, and in order to save him from imprisonment,
various authorities of the County were bribed with fresh game from
the hunt. But later that year, the congregation because of his
alcoholism, which prevented him from adequately serving his
parishioners, sent the preacher away.
His successor in office was Barany,
who reported on his coming to Gyönk in great detail in his history,
but gives no indication or reason for his quick departure a year
later to serve the congregation in Györköny. We can assume that the
landlord in Gyönk had something to do with it. He was the Reformed
Superintendent and fiercely Calvinistic, Peter Magyary-Kossa, and
Georg Barany the Lutheran pastor was a Pietist, and the two men
differed greatly in their theological outlook and teaching, so that
a “friendly” atmosphere was hardly possible between the two
confessions in Gyönk. For that reason Barany accepted the call from
the Lutheran landlord in Györköny, Janos Meszlenyi and took up his
ministry there. Pietists were also unwelcome in certain Orthodox
Lutheran circles in Hungary as well.
In 1719, Peter Magyari-Kossa and his
wife returned to Aranyo in Komarom County, from where he complained
that the County did not respect the borders of his holdings in
Gyönk. He appointed Istvan Szekeli to look after his affairs in
terms of disputes with the County, who like Magyari-Kossa was also a
Calvinist. Magyari died in 1720 and left a widow with five
children, the youngest of which was four years old. His wife now
took over the affairs of the family and the family holdings and did
so quite effectively. She mortgaged Gyönk and some of the nearby
holdings to the widow Maria Sokorai and György Halai on March 10,
1722 for 200 Gulden for one year.
In the fall of 1725, Peter
Magyari-Kossa the younger took over the family estates again, and
forced his subject peasants to pay off the mortgage, which led to
imprisonment for those who refused and fines and punishments for the
others.
The Tax Conscription list for the
County in 1725 (which information was collected in the late fall of
1724) identified 23 Hungarian taxpayers in Gyönk. The census of
1725, however reports, that in addition to the 33 Hungarians living
there, there were also Germans who came from Ciko and Varsad, both
in Tolna County.
There were sixteen German taxpayers:
Kaspar Trapp
Heinrich Neller
Johann Eberhard Keil (Kehl)
Johann Christoph Kolb
Jakob Jeckel (Jackl)
Johann Schildwächter
Thomas Polch (Polt) (Pall)
Peter Muth
Johann Pentom (Pentrin)
Konrad Krähling
Johann Gebhardt
Johann Heinrich Petermann
Wilhelm Baltasar Schmidt
Andreas Schauermann (Sauermann)
Peter Klener (Klenner)
Heinrich Meinhardt
Andreas Schauermann came from Varsad,
the others apparently all came from Cikó and re-settled here because
of pressure to convert to Roman Catholicism.
The Conscription Lists of 1728
provides one clue to their place of origin, which validates that
they had been newcomers in Cikó and had simply moved on after a very
short stay there.
In 1735, and probably already in 1734,
the quarrelsome Peter Magyary-Kossa (the younger) moved to Gyönk and
took over the administration of his landholdings and began to
institute measures that were very difficult for his colonist
subjects. The majority of the Germans, about thirty families left,
and found a new home at Mekényes which was part of the Esterhazy
estate, and from there they pressed charges against their former
landlord because of the many injustices they had to suffer at
Magyary-Kossa’s hands.
Through the ongoing arrival of more
and more German families in the next years, strong German
communities evolved in both places, but with Gyönk being the larger.