Dunavecse Summary
Dunavecse
Summary
Summary
If you head for Baja along the Danube starting from Budapest in a Southern direction, you will reach the Solti-plain at Dömsöd, at the lower end of the Csepel-island. If you proceed from here on the catchment plain, you will leave dozens of settlements behind by the time you reach Kalocsa. The route taken by the wanderer will be slightly broken half-way through if he is to visit Dunavecse, which closely follows the bank of the river.
The border area of the settlement lining the Danube was first inhabited by humans for a longer period of time at the beginning of the Neolithic age. Later the Bronze Age man also settled here, and then, during subsequent centuries, the traces of Scythian, Celtic, Roman, Hun, Gepid, and Avar lives were left in the area surrounding the settlement.
After the Hungarian Settlement, the tribe of Árpád, who was the leader of the Hungarians, settled in this vicinity first. A charter made the first mention of Vecse, a village in the Arpadian age in 1271. The existence of two further Arpadian villages, Csanád and Fehéregyháza can be proved by the church ruins found in the vicinity of today’s village. These were all owned by the Tetétleni family before the Mohács disaster.
After the fall of Buda, Vecse also became a village under the Turkish rule from the middle of the XVI century, and it was ordered by the Turkish military administration to belong to the Pest nahije within the sanjak of Buda. Soon, the Turkish tax collectors appeared, and for nearly one and a half centuries, the people paid taxes to two lords. They paid to the Turks, and they paid to the tax collecting knight officers, who arrived from royal Hungary. At the end of the century, in the aftermath of the fifteen year war, only few villages could continue their existence in the vicinity. Vecse survived this difficult period of one and a half decade as well, due to the perseverance and good luck of its people.
The weakening of the Turkish empire increased the burdens of the inhabitants in the XVII century. The area became an easy prey for the predatory Tartar auxiliary forces, and the Hungarian and Western mercenary freebooters. The villages in the region organised the so-called peasant county at the beginning of the 1660-ies as a self-protective initiative. This, however, helped little: the people living between the Danube and the Tisza were fully extinguished. Only a few stronger boroughs and some villages having successfully learnt some self-protective tricks, could live to see the XVIII century. Vecse was among these remaining settlements.
Due to Protestant missionaries, the people of Vecse were converted by the Reformation, and they could relatively peacefully exercise their new religion during the Turkish rule. After the 1690-ies, however, conversion back to the Catholic religion started rather strongly on the initiative of the Hapsburgs even in the areas under the Turkish rule. That is why the mostly Protestant inhabitants of the region supported Rákóczi in 1703, who proclaimed freedom of religion. The Freedom Fight, however, failed, and the manifestations of religious intolerance, and violence against Protestants caused a lot of problems to the people of the village.
The Földváry family became the landlords of Vecse from the end of the XVII century. The fields around the village owned by the landlords, and the neighbouring wastelands were regularly leased by the farmer com-munity of the borough. In this way, it could pay its serfs’ burdens in one amount. This looser dependence made it possible for them to pursue a freer farming, as a result of which the population started to layer on the basis of emerging differences in wealth. This inner fragmentation was coupled by the economic decline of the Napoleonic Wars, as well as an increase in the number of traders, tradesmen, and intellectuals.
From the beginning of the XIX century, the controversies between the peasant citizens and their landlords in the borough increased. In the middle of the 1860-ies, the Földváry family, having won several legal cases, broke up and sold their lands in the fields around Vecse. This endangered the basic source of living for the inhabitants of the settlement, as they were deprived of their lands which they almost treated as their own land. More and more of the original Protestant population moved out of Dunavecse, which was degraded to a large village in 1872. Due to scarce lands, those remaining in the village introduced the habit of “single child families”. In spite of this, the number of the population did not have a spectacular reduction as quite a few people, mostly poor Catholic families moved into Vecse.
The economic emergency, and the scarcity of land compelled both the original population and the new settlers to partially or fully give up traditional farming, and to try out new methods of farming. Vecse gradually became a horticultural village from the beginning of the XX century: they grew different vegetables and flowers on their plots around the houses following the demand of the market.
Successful accommodation to the changing conditions significantly transformed Dunavecse in the decades preceding and following the turn of the century. This gross transformation process was broken only temporarily by the first World War, and the following complicated political aftermath. The village could quite quickly recover from the severe losses in human life, and from the material and moral damage. The flexibly changing horticultural way of farming helped the people of Vecse through the agricultural crisis as well between 1929 and 1933.
Between the compromise with the Hapsburgs and the second World War, the stratification of the population became stronger and stronger both on the basis of social position and religion. There was a growth in the proportion of the mostly Catholic tradesmen, the Jewish traders, and the mostly Nazarene and Baptist landless day-labourers. The appearance of the settlement also changed during these decades to become urban, or rather to look like a small town with gardens and groves. Its rank as a district centre provided Dunavecse with several offices and institutions, a civil school, a railway station, a port, and also a role which influenced even the surrounding settlements.
The small communities in Vecse lived their golden age in these decades. Amateur drama performances, and a singing club, as well as boy scout camps coming here from all over the country gained a reputation for the village far beyond the borders of it between the two world wars.
The village not yet recovered from the losses of the second World War, and the damages caused by the front-line marching through Vecse when following the political turn in 1948, the development of the settlement was broken, as well. After the revolution in 1956, following the reorganisation of agriculture, and the industrialisation locally, the settlement started on an up-trend again, and preserved its role as a district centre until 1970. Dunaújváros, its neighbour on the other bank of the Danube, had a controversial effect on the life of the village over the last few decades. The industrial town in the neighbourhood gave some job opportunities, but continuously contaminated the water and air of Vecse with its industry.
The main characteristic of the decade following the change of the political system was that the citizens and leaders of the settlement re-discovered and again can make use of the traditional values of their more and less distant past.
The cult of Petőfi coming down through generations is one of the most valuable intellectual treasures of the village. The two hundred year old Protestant church, and its one hundred and seventy-five year old tower built by József Hild are the most valued and the oldest relics of the architectural heritage.
