Hungarian/Csango beadwork references?

Do you have a pic that you could post to Flickr or a web site? Maybe we know it by a different name.

Barbara

Bead & Polymer Clay Habitué

There is a very fine line between a hobby and mental illness. (Dave Barry)

Marion and I were just in Hungary and Romania for two folk music/dance

All I've got is the two beginner pieces Marion did, which don't really give an idea.

There is an article by Robin Atkins cited on her site:

- "Beadwork of Hungary and Transylvania," Beads: Journal of the Society of Bead Researchers, Vol. 14, 2002

(which I have no idea how to get hold of) and this image off the web is a *bit* like the same style, though the Moldavian Csango usually go for more open net-like designs using beads of varying lengths:

On the other hand, the necklaces on sale in the Budapest Ethnographic Museum's shop are exactly in the Csango style. I kinda doubt that you'd know it under another name, as the Csango folk culture is both very assertive and very local. The village we were in had a distinctive design of women's skirt which has no close parallel anywhere else, not even in villages only ten miles away. I could hear village-level idiosyncrasies in the dance music - the tunes are known all across northeast Romania but you could identify where a player came from within a few miles by how they played them.

I have since found from some googling that the Hungarian Bead Society's address is directly across the street from a cafe in Budapest that we used several times when we were there. They would have been the obvious place to ask. AAARRGGHHH!!!!

==== j a c k at c a m p i n . m e . u k === ==== Jack Campin, 11 Third St, Newtongrange EH22 4PU, Scotland == mob 07800 739 557 CD-ROMs and free stuff: Scottish music, food intolerance, and Mac logic fonts

This may be a stupid question, but if this is from Romania, why are you looking in Hungary?

(sorry for the rather long quote, but I couldn't decide what to delete).

Newtongrange? That's near Edinburgh, isn't it?

Aloha (or Cheers),

Maren (spent a few weeks in Edinburgh in the last several years

- work related)

The Csango are a Hungarian-speaking minority who have been in (what is now) Romania since the Middle Ages. Their culture has been subject to official repression ever since they came under Romanian rule, and this intensified severely in the last years of Ceausescu's regime. They're of particular interest to Hungarian folklorists, since they have been separate from the Hungarians in Hungary or the Szekely Hungarians of Transylvania for many centuries - their language retains features lost in Hungary-Hungarian more than 200 years ago, and their music seems to retain melodies that date right back to the origins of the Hungarians in central Asia 2500 years ago (it's the oldest traceable folk music in Europe). While Hungarian musicologists and folklorists were rediscovering and documenting them, doing the same in Romania could lose you your job, get you a prison stretch, or prompt the authorities to demolish your entire village. At the present time, the Hungarian "dance house" movement, based mainly in Budapest, has rediscovered their culture in a big way, and we only found out about it through them - they've been organizing these folk camps in Romania for 12 years now. You can go to a ceilidh doing Csango dances in Budapest almost every night of the week.

There might well be places in Romania now where you could buy some of those Hungarian publications (in the largely Hungarian-speaking cities of Brasov, Cluj and Targu Mures) but there will still be few if any publications about any aspect of Csango culture produced in Romania itself. Official Romanian attitudes to it are still like redneck America's attitudes to Hispanics living in what used to be Mexico.

National Geographic did a good piece about the Csango in 2006, and there are some supporting materials on their website.

==== j a c k at c a m p i n . m e . u k === ==== Jack Campin, 11 Third St, Newtongrange EH22 4PU, Scotland == mob 07800 739 557 CD-ROMs and free stuff: Scottish music, food intolerance, and Mac logic fonts

I have just had a look in my book, " A world guide to beadwork" by Caroline Crabtree and Pam Stallebrass. There is a picture of a mans hat with an elaborate hat band from Transylvania and also a watch fob depicting the Hungarian flag. There are also other pictures of beadwork embroidery from Transylvania,, Hungary and Ukraine.

This book was given to me as a Mother's Day gift from my lovely friends on the news group. Shirley

In message , Jack Campin - bogus address writes

I'm computer challenged at the moment. Mine crashed, so I'm on my husband's computer and don't have access to my bookmarks/favourites.

The example you posted reminds me of some of the work on Russian beading sites. Like Marie's (Anyone here know her URL?). My daughter- in-law is from Zakarpatzia (Transcarpathia) in the South West corner of Ukraine, where she grew up speaking Hungarian with her grandparents, Ukrainian with her parents, Russian at school, taught high school French, and now speaks English. My DIL doesn't bead, but is a good example of the kind of polyculturalism in parts of the USSR and why you might find what you want at a "Russian" site.

Tina