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• New Settlements in Bishkek: Law, Urban Space, Culture and Socio-Economic Development

  99-122

  Mirlan Alymbaev

  Views:

  83

  In Kyrgyzstan, internal migrants in search of a better life left high mountains, clean air, and their native village. There are tens of thousands of such people around the capital city of Bishkek. Physically, they are in the capital in the status of city dwellers, but living conditions, the level of access to public services are at the level of remote regions. And this is how these internal migrants live for tens of years, a new generation of children is growing up who were born in these slums where lack of infrastructure such as schools, drinking water, medical facility, electricity, and transport.

  This study is aimed to explore the living conditions of residents in the new settlements and their rights for decent housing. The study was prepared in order to attract the attention of the state authorities to solve the urgent problems of the residents.

• The New Challenges and Situation of an Ethnic Minority within a Local Community in the Light of Social Changes

  151-177

  Gyöngyi Kormányos Katona

  Views:

  34

  Our memory is largely shaped by the way we look at the peoples currently living within the Carpathian Basin. Once a well-known tobacco-growing village in Historic Hungary, Torda (also known as Torontáltorda in Hungarian) is now a dispersed settlement with a Hungarian ethnic majority located in the Banat region of Vojvodina, Serbia.

  The shifting of national borders, the two World Wars, the events of the Yugoslav Wars and migratory movements have collectively changed and decimated the lives of Hungarians who had found themselves outside their motherland’s borders after the 1920s.

  In spite of the decline in population, the emigration of young people, and the everyday struggles resulting from hard living conditions, this village in the Central Banat district could attract further socio-ethnographic interest. In the micro-communities of rural settlements, education and religion play a key role in creating social value, maintaining Hungarian culture in the area and forming a national, local sense of identity within the community. Commemorative rituals, local traditions and national holidays often cross each others’ paths and blend together through education and religion, highlighting the reality and cultural values of the community, as well as the array of connections between community life and ethnic culture. This study discusses Torda’s present in the light of social change and the process of cultural mapping, touching on the importance of the local cultural association in the community’s life. This study also explores the events of the past few decades that have left a deep imprint on the micro-community’s life in a cultural, social and ethnic sense.

• Remain of a Dialect in an Urban Cultural Medium by Means of Folk-tales: Role of Some Tale-tellers of a Hungarian Ethnic Group Székelys of Bukovina in Hungary

  31-46

  Helen Pal

  Views:

  42

  The aim of the paper is to show the role that storytellers can play in the transmission of traditions, identity and dialect today. The paper focuses on a Hungarian ethnic group: Szeklers of Bukovina settled in Hungary in 1945. The main aim of this paper is to present the function of dialects in tales and tale-telling after the change of traditional peasant way of life and dialects. In Bukovina this ethnic group was isolated from the Hungarian mother-country and the majority of Hungarians, their cultural and language changes did not reach them, therefore the members of this ethnic group could retain their traditional culture and dialect. However, in Hungary they were settled into 38 settlements, thereby their original communities broke up. The dialectal and sociolinguistic data of this paper comes from the storyteller’s websites, written and oral personal stories, the text and sound-recording of folk-tales, and also data of formal dialectal researches of this ethnic group is used. This paper presents an analysis of some storytellers who use several dialect elements of this ethnic group, besides the role of dialects in tale-telling is studied too. It is an important aspect of this analyse how some storytellers utilize their dialect in tales and during tale-telling, and why they usually use it. The results of research present that these storytellers can use dialect elements in different ways in their tale-telling. The main conclusion is that use of a dialect can be a part of language education, a dialect is an identity marker, and by the help of it a storyteller can create a pictorial experience during the tale-telling, besides it can be a source of humour too. 

• “It all started with the match factory in Debrecen”: Swabians from the Tokaj-Hegyalja area as forced laborers in the former Soviet Union

  119-138

  Árpádné Endrész

  Róbert Gergely Scholtz

  Views:

  135

  In the last year of World War II, the Soviet army occupied Eastern Hungary. Following the military order of Marshal Malinovsky, the ethnic Germans in Hungary were forced to perform forced labor. The abducted people were branded war criminals and taken to coal mines in the Don-bassin, the so called "soviet paradise". Altogether 348 people were taken from the ethnic german settlements of Tokaj-Hegyalja, 30 of whom never returned. The youngest of the civilians was 16 years old and the oldest 65. They were told that they had to go to the match factory in Debrecen for a "little work / Malenkij robot". Most of the deportees could only return home after 2-4 years - spent in inhumane contitions. Our project commemorates their memories. Since the years of silence are over, nowadays, we are free to talk about events that have taken place 70 years ago. We hope they will never happen again.