Unfortunately, even the worldwide Rusyn community knows little if anything about the historical Rusyn villages in the territory of present-day Hungary (perhaps, except for Komlóska and Múcsony), which is why it’s often very interesting to search the scarce and sporadic information about these former Rusyn settlements. Many of them had not only been absorbed by the overwhelming neighboring ethnic Hungarian population by the beginning of the 20th century but have (nearly) disappeared from the map due to the depopulation of the countryside which is an overall contemporary trend not only in Hungary but the rest of Europe too.
Owing to Dr. Mónika Bodnár, Head of the Department of Ethnic Studies and Museology of the Miskolc Museum, we got a chance to look at the history of one of such ‘dwarf villages’ (the term is used in Hungary to categorize rural settlements with less than 200 inhabitants) located in Borsod-Abaúj-Zemplén megye (province), Tornabarakony[1]. The village lies in the Barakony Brook Valley, on the slopes of the Tornai Hills, some 15 km off the Hungarian-Slovak border, and 70 km to the north from Miskolc.
The old history of the village’s Greek Catholic parish is similar to that of other Rusyn parishes of North-Eastern Hungary. Initially, it was subject to the Eger Roman Catholic Bishop; from 1771 it belonged to the Munkács (Mukačevo/Mukachevo) Greek Catholic Diocese, and in 1818, when the Eperjes (Prešov/Pryashiv) Greek Catholic Diocese was separated from Munkács, it became part of that. After the collapse of Austria-Hungary, Toronybarakony remained in Hungary (altogether, there were 20 Pryashiv and 1 Mukachevo Greek Catholic communities that found themselves in Hungary, cut off from their maternal eparchies, in addition to the Hungarian Hajdúdorog Diocese established in 1912). Then the local Greek Catholics were taken care of by the priest from Múcsony, and administratively these villages were subordinated to the newly-formed Miskolc Apostolic Exarchate. So, it is noteworthy that the then Rusyn villages in North Hungary were not included in the Hajdúdorog Diocese which, though initially having also been of Rusyn ethnic origin, had been fully Magyarised long before. They became part of the Hajdúdorog Diocese only after World War II. It is interesting that now the Greek Catholic church in Tornabarakony is taken care of by the priest coming from the nearby village Tornahorváti (Chorváty) in Slovakia.
It is uncertain when the village of Tornabarakony became ethnically Rusyn, but according to the Schematisms[2], a Greek Catholic parish had already existed in Tornabarakony as early as 1648. It is noteworthy that both before (in the time of the Mongol and then Turkish invasions, and at other times) and afterward the village had been depopulated and then repopulated many times. Dr. Mónika Bodnár notes that “as far as there was a church community there, which was a Greek Catholic one, it is certain that the local dwellers were Rusyns who might have been resettling further on or dying out.” A document from 1735 states that “Count Gyulai, who was the landlord of that area, not long ago inhabited the before barrenly staying locality with resettling a Ruthenian colony there,” and this resettlement was finally a success – though the landlords continued to invite new settlers into the village, which was how Roman Catholics (i.e. ethnic Slovaks) settled there, whose share approximated to 50% at the beginning of the 20th century.
To learn about the language(s) used by the villagers, one should also refer to the Schematisms which, starting from 1823 provided such data. So, according to the Schematisms, the language used in the village in 1823–1890 was Slavo-Ruthenica et Hungarica, but starting from 1898 the Schematisms mentioned Hungarian as the only language spoken in the community. Thus, concludes Dr. Mónika Bodnár, the abandoning of the Rusyn language happened at the threshold of the 20th century.
The statistics also showed Slovaks that lived in Tornabarakony, which must have been the Roman Catholic part of the village’s population; by the beginning of the 20th century, they had also assimilated with Hungarians. However, due to the similarity of the East Slovak patios with the Rusyn vernacular, the Rusyns might have also been recorded as Slovaks, “as was the case in other villages.”
As for the absolute number of the villagers, it approximated 300 persons in the middle of the 19th century, and then it had been decreasing – first slowly, and from the 1970s quite rapidly (in 1949 – 269 persons; in 1970 – 200; in 1982 – 95; in 2015 – 22; in 2020 – 10, mainly elderly sole persons). The causes for this depopulation were emigration overseas (before World War I), forced collectivization (after World War II), relocation to urban localities, etc.
Lately, the population of Tornabarakony has been growing slowly – this time, due to the immigration of a family with many children from Transylvania, Romania, and new settlers from Debrecen, Budapest, and Košice who bought houses here and used them mainly as holiday resorts. The new settlers have set up NGOs and regularly arrange environmental and tradition-keeping summer camps, and even icon-painting plain-airs – which may be good for the rebirth of the nearly vanished village (they even, being not Greek Catholics themselves, try to preserve the traditions and support the church; it was they who invited a Greek Catholic priest from Slovakia in 2010 to hold Liturgies in the village church), but regretfully, this is a different Tornabarakony, with no Rusyn charm to it.
[1] Dr. Bodnár Mónika. Toronybarakony, a változó falu [Toronybarakony : the Changing Village]. In: Tanulmányok a Magyarországi bolgár, görög, lengyel, örmény és ruszin nemzetiségek néprajzából. Kötet 11 (2021). 149-162 o.
[2] From Greek Σχήμα – scheme, figure – a list of persons or institutions. Church Schematisms present lists of clergymen, together with most important data, lists of all eparchies, the numbers of the faithful and church associations, etc. The oldest Greek Catholic schematism in Austro-Hungary was that of the Munkács Diocese dated 1814.