Tállya Summary
Tállya
Summary
Summary
In the XVI–XVII centuries, Tállya, surrounded by a stone wall was one of the most significant boroughs of the Tokaj-Hegyalja, having become famous for its vine-growing. The village, extending in the north-east from the Szerencs brook, and settled in a valley between hills of four-five hundred meters was elevated into the rank of a borough as early as at the end of the Middle Ages. Historic and linguistic facts make it probable that it was established by French settlers from Olaszliszka and Bodrogolaszi at the very beginning of the XIII century. An earlier longer-lasting local human activity in this region was dated by archaeologists back to the late Stone and Bronze Ages. Researchers explored the ruins of three castles from the latter historic period. The Hungarian settlers did not occupy the vicinity of Tállya due to the lack of water.
In the village born at the beginning of the 1200-ies, a Gothic church was built in the 1330-ies, and a parish was organised around it. Its medieval significance, however, was given by the castle which protected the metal and salt trade-route between Tokaj, Tállya, Abaújszántó, Gönc and Kassa from the first half of the XIII century. The royal castle got into private hands in 1382. Out of its owners, we may mention the Zudar family, palatine Garai, György Brankovics, János Hunyadi and the Szapolyaies – constituting the noble families in Hungary. The troops of King Ferdinand I. took it from the latter ones after the country had been split into two parts. As a consequence of the sieges of 1528 and 1536, the castle turned into ruins. In 1541, Gáspár Serédy received a donation from the king for the ruins and the borough of Tállya.
After the Turkish rule, and the split of the country into three parts, Tállya was integrated into the Regéci estate. It was owned by the Alaghies, the Mágócsies, and finally, the castle and the borough got to the ownership of Zsigmond Rákóczi by marrying the widowed Judit Alaghy. The borough was owned by the Rákóczies until 1715. Then, it was owned by the Trautsons, then the treasury, and lastly by the Bretzenheim family, from whom it descended on the female line to the Maillot barons.
The history of Tállya between the XVI and XVII centuries, was even more hectic than the stormy history of its inheritance. Due to its vine production, its citizens grew rich, and in the 1540-ies, they were converted to the Reformed faith. The pastor of the town was András Szkhárosi Horvát for a while, and then Gáspár Károlyi from 1584 to 1586. This was a golden age in the history of the town. The wine import to Poland yielded a huge profit. The number of the population of the borough grew from two-three hundred to one thousand two to one thousand three hundred people. The area of the vineyards amounted to five-six hundred holds. Villeinage was gradually phased out on the hills in the XVI century. Vineyards were either cultivated by the owners themselves, or they made day-labourers work on them. Apart from the outstanding aristocratic families, many of the nobility from Szabolcs and Zemplén had vineyards on the hills of Tállya, but the largest areas were cultivated by the citizens and communities of the towns in Upper-Hungary – Bártfa, Eperjes and Kassa.
Military campaigns, from time to time, turned the golden age into hell. Tállya was made to pay ransoms several times during the fifteen year war and the ravaging of the Haiduks. Frequent fires were destroying the town, and the population was often decimated by epidemics. It lived to see the saddest period of its history from the Wesselényi conspiracy until the end of the Freedom Fight under Ferenc Rákóczi II. Between 1710 and 1715, the number of its population was down to a couple of hundred, and many of its vineyards became a wasteland.
After 1715, the settlement and the vineyards in its vicinity started on a quick growth once again. The number of its population came near to four thousand by the end of the XVIII century. The society and the official religion of the town were under frequent changes as they followed the whimsical happenings. During the XVI century, the population slowly evolved from serfdom, in the XVII century, nobility appeared on a large-scale, and finally, in the XVIII century, craftsmanship became characteristic, only to see a degradation of the earlier surrounded oppidum with a royal license into a large peasant village in the XIX century. The catholic population of the borough was converted to the Reformed religion around 1540–42. The almost uniformly Calvinist population at the beginning of the XVII century became mixed in it religion. First the Catholics, then some Evangelical, and parallel to them some Jewish people settled in a significant number in Tállya. By the second half of the century, a Catholic presence became more and more dominating.
After the first division of Poland in 1772, the Hegyalja wines became less significant, which undermined the economic strength of the settlement. It was destroyed by recurrent fires in 1810, 1851, and 1861. The revolution of 1848 could still give rise to some hopes in the people of the town, but only disappointment followed. The tithe on the vine lingered on, which the people had to redeem for huge amounts of money after 1868. They were still paying themselves out of the tithe, when phylloxera ruined their plantations. Thanks to Dr. Gyula Bártfai Szabó, the vineyards on the hillsides were rejuvenated after the turn of the century, but Tállya was unable to regain its earlier lustre and rank. It could not any more compete with the cheap wine grown on sandy soil after having lost not only its foreign markets but also those in Upper-Northern Hungary as a consequence of Trianon.
It only added to the hardships of the people living in the settlement that they had to endure a tribute to be paid to the Rumanians, who made them write up a list of the wines in the cellars, and plundered them. In 1945, it was the Russians who drank up the wine to be found in the cellars without putting them on a register. But real decline only followed afterwards. Jews were deported in 1944. In 1945, the Russians displaced more than fifty people. The Communist rule after the world war nationalised the forest of the settlement, ruined the vine hills with an imposed co-operative movement, and made wine production impossible by reducing the price of quality wines. It rented out the Rákóczi mansion, worthy of a better fate, as temporary lodgings, turned the Balogh mansion into a sheepfold, forced people to keep away from the churches, and let the whole of Hegyalja, together with Tállya lose its basis of existence, its self-esteem, and pride. It let it happen, and even facilitated the erosion of a culture accumulated by way of experience, and that of diligence, which had a high rank among the values of the Hegyalja region.
And there is Tállya now, free again. It has no capital. People’s sense of ownership is minimal. Probably, they would still be susceptible to the acquisition of new knowledge, but they have no money to buy the means to apply it. They have the daily sensation that they are loosing their ground, on which their ancestors produced wines admired by popes, emperors, kings, as well as writers and artists comparable to Voltaire.
