Dudar Summary
Dudar
Summary
Summary
The natural environment of the small village lying on the borderline between the Old-Bakony and the Eastern-Bakony mountains is dominated by two clearly separated features of the ground. The plateau surrounded by the peaks of the Sűrű hills in Dudar has woods on it even today. This served the people living here for many centuries, who used the trees for charcoal-burning, lime-burning, yoke-carving, and for their buildings.
The extraordinary beauty of the vicinity is emphasised by the break lines clearly indicating the boundaries of the plateau. This is a territory where the peoples of the different ages found abode or shelter in the caves of the Ördög-árok rift and the Magos hill. The big games that can be still found in the woods of Dudar were probably hunted by the ancestors of the Nádasdy family – the first significant landowner family of the area.
The old village was built under the plateau, on the slopes of the Dudar recess, or more precisely, on a smaller elevation between the Borda-hill and the Magos-hill. The area of the cultivated land stretches from north-east to south-west, from Gelegényes to Cser. Kisdudarpuszta, the manor of the landlord became wedged in the Eastern side of this area at the end of the XVIII century. Although it belonged to Dudar administratively even after this, but formed a separate unit as the centre of the landlord’s manor, and the place where the settled Catholic Germans lived. The area of the estate kept continuously shrinking from the second half of the XIX century, until Kisdudar was fully incorporated by the settlement of Dudar in 1949.
The village was owned by the Dudary line of the Csák dynasty, who came from the vicinity of the Vértes hill after the second half of the XIII century. It got into the hands of the Halápies at the end of the XIV century. In 1430, István Rozgonyi obtained the settlement as an addition to the castle of Csókakő. Miklós Újlaki, the ban of Macsó also cast an eye on Dudar: from 1459 until the Mohács Disaster, the village was owned by the Újlakies.
According to some legends, there was an earlier village (Nemes)Darna around Bödön-kút in the Middle Ages. It should be confirmed by chartered data and archaeological research whether this „ancient village” really existed or not. Just like evidence should be collected to prove the hypothetical answer given to the question about the origin of the people of Dudar. In our view, it would be difficult to question the Easter origin of the old Dudar dynasties in the light of the anthropological investigations so far. We consider that the most likely origin of the people living in the settlement is a Kuman group, who settled here during the Middle Ages.
The life of the population changed drastically after the Turkish military expedition in Hungary in 1543-45. The village was considered to be a borderland, and the people were taxed by their Hungarian and Turkish landlords at the same time. According to the census of the period, it continuously belonged to the castle of Palota until 1594, then it was donated to Péter Huszár, and later inherited by the Borka family. In the Turkish administration, Dudar belonged to the area of the sanjak in Székesfehérvár.
In spite of the continuous life- and asset-danger, the settlement continued to exist during the one and a half centuries of the Turkish Rule, although Dudar had its good share in devastation that followed the march of the Turks. The remaining population lived from the useful yields of the forest (abundant wild fruits, and hunting) in addition to the cultivation of the land, which was concentrated on a small area. A constant source of income was ensured by the swine and grazing stock, fed on the acorns of the forests, as well as the production and sales of special tools (e.g. yoke).
During the peaceful decades of the XVIII century, the population could regenerate its strength, but its living-space narrowed down significantly. The Nádasdy family, the new landlord of the village, established a manor with a local centre first in Lepsény, and later in Bakonynána, where the workforce was ensured from the remaining serfs. In order to start the manor, the landlord reinstated the earlier services of the serfs in Dudar, limited their farming and animal production by way of prohibiting the use of the forests and pastures freely used by the local population until then, and by driving thousands of his sheep on the arable land and pastures in Dudar. This strongly affected the community of Dudar, which was shown by the outbreak of the peasants’ movements in the spring of 1848, the main cause of which was the population’s need for land, which was surfaced in the forms of demands for and seizures of arable land, green field, forests and pastures.
The Austrian absolute monarchy, after the failure of the Freedom Fight fought for Hungarian independence, let the serfs keep the freedom that they gained during the revolution. The people of Dudar concluded their forest and pasture separation agreements with their landlord as early as in 1850. Most of the land owning farmers of the village farmed on small estates of a few holds, which was aggravated by the fact that many of them had pieces of land on twenty-twenty five different spots in the fields. But just like the abolishment of serfdom did not meet the expectations, the consolidation of holdings could not solve the problems either.
In the meantime, the people of Dudar had to live a very difficult life, anyway. Due to some natural catastrophes, famine appeared in this area followed by a great fire, which consumed half of the village. The small settlement living in isolation, without being affected by the industrial revolution, could not really experience any of the „happy times of peace” – the age of a spectacular growth in the country between 1867 and 1900. (The first threshing-machine pulled by horses and oxen arrived in Dudar for the first time in 1912.) The mortality of children was at an astonishingly high level even at the turn of the century. It is not surprising at all that many of the people living here had dreams of a better future, and whoever could, went to seek a better life overseas, joining the wave of emigration, which drifted several hundreds of thousands of Hungarians to America.
The reformed population, preserving their archaic customs and culture, formed a unique, closed community enclosed by the ring of the adjacent Catholic villages with a German population. This was recognised by a group of scholars consisting of renowned Hungarian and foreign experts when in 1937, they selected the village to be the object and the scene of their village research activity.
The great wars of the twentieth century were very trying the families of Dudar. The memorial column of the First World War is still standing in the centre of the village to commemorate these trials, and the plaque is still in the church to remind us of the terrible sacrifices of the Second World War. In spite of the distribution of land, the shortage of land still made it very difficult for the people to make ends meet.
The slow opening of the isolated world of the village was largely due to the exploration of the coal resources hidden under Dudar, and the opening of the coal mines. The development, induced by the emergence of industry, provided the village with new job opportunities and more favourable living conditions, which made people forget about the problems caused by opening of the mine.
In our work, we wanted to describe those episodes in the history of this reformed Hungarian settlement which make Dudar worthy of knowing and distinct from other villages living an ostensibly uneventful life without making any large contributions to the history of the country.
