Croats among Hungarians: the grape harvest festival
The study is based on interviews collected in the course of field ethnolinguistic research in 2019 from Croats living in Hungary in the vicinity of Szombathei. The article deals with the grape harvest festival called trgadba, or surety. Testimonies from local Croatians are analysed against the background of the corresponding Hungarian tradition, as well as in the context of socio-historical processes that took place in the region in the twentieth century. For the sake of comparison, data on the grape harvest holiday in neighbouring Slovakia is used. Special attention is paid to the perception of the holiday by the Croat population, and their qualification of it as their own / alien, and primordial / new. Some local Croatians believe the celebration of the grape harvest to be some conventional semi-official holiday that has no support in local tradition, linking it with the Hungarian nature of the holiday, as well as the fact that, under Socialism, the vineyards were nationalised and the tradition broken. Others qualify the holiday as a novelty of recent times. It is shown that for the region as a whole, the holiday is an innovation going back to the late nineteenth century and since then has been considered an urban fashion. Attempts to develop wine tourism in the region and integrate the Croatian villages of Burgenland into the so-called wine roads have not yet met any significant support among residents, and the grape harvest festival has a conditional and rather formal character for them which is not associated with their own ethnocultural identity.