There is a wooden instrument sitting on top of the piano at my parent’s house in Philadelphia. It’s been there for years, probably even decades. I’ve seen it many times, though I’ve never given it much thought. I didn’t know where it came from or why we had it. I’m embarrassed to say it seemed like clutter.
The instrument, it turns out, is a zither, and it belonged to my grandfather. It was one of his most prized possessions.
The zither is nearly one hundred years old — at the very least, it is 86. I can trace it definitively to 1937, when Opapa played it for his classmates at Eötvös Gimnázium in Budapest. According to the Eötvös Gimnázium yearbook for 1937-8,
Gerbner György, student of Class 8B gave an educational and interesting performance on Palóc music; this time he performed several original Palóc folk songs by playing on a Palóc zither.
By the time Opapa played the zither for his classmates in 1937, the instrument had already traveled at least 120 kilometers from the small village of Rimóc, in northern Hungary, to my grandfather’s home in Budapest.
I’ve written about Rimóc before: it was the Hungarian village where Opapa spent the happiest summers of his youth. Rimóc and neighboring Hollókő are home to the Palóc people, ethnic Hungarians who speak in a distinctive dialect and maintain unique cultural traditions, dress, and songs.
Opapa was deeply passionate about Hungarian folklore, and especially the Palóc people. In a draft of his (unfinished) autobiography, he wrote:
I spent the most rewarding months each year of my teens in various villages in Hungary, living and working with the peasants and trying to learn their culture, their language, their dialects, collecting folk songs, folk tales, playing their handmade zither (which I still have).
The Palóc called Opapa the “fiatalur,” which means “young gentleman.” In the village, Opapa “performed first aid when needed, with iodine and bandages that [he] had with [him], as there was no doctor within hours of walking or driving a horse-drawn carriage.”
According to Opapa, the Palóc “seldom walked or marched without singing. There were songs for every occasion and every mood.” One genre of folksong was what Opapa translated as “Acting up,” which “consisted of singing at the top of our voices on the street usually Fridays after midnight and firing guns in the air, both prohibited, with the heavily armed gendarmes in hot pursuit but never quite catching up.”
Another genre of Palóc folksongs was called lyanozas, which was “roughly translatable as ‘girl-ing’ or ‘doing the girls.’” In this genre,
Young men would walk the streets of the village at night and stop in front of houses where marriageable age young girls lived. They sang a few songs and then entered the home and went to the bedroom where girl lay in bed fully clothed, with the parents discreetly retired to another room of the house. There was much singing, chatting, joking and teasing. Finally the group left to go to another house, except for one young man who was the most serious or persistent suitor.
Opapa’s letters from this time — 1936 and 1937 — are brimming with fervor for Hungarian folklore, though they don’t go into as much detail about the actual folk songs — he doesn’t mention any by name. Nor does he mention the zither. But he must have gotten the instrument during one of those summers, since he used it to perform during his last year in high school, in 1937-8.
After I published my original post about Opapa’s time in Rimóc, both of my parents commented about Opapa’s zither. “[Opapa] kept his wooden zither all his life, everywhere he moved,” wrote my mom. “It now sits lies atop our piano, strings unstrung and ribbons fading.” My dad added, “I am pretty sure [Rimóc] is where [Opapa] got and learned a little of how to play his zither (now on top of our piano and in need of new strings).”
I was astonished — and embarassed — that I had overlooked the incredible gem of history sitting in my parents’ living room. I’m sure someone had told me it belonged to Opapa, but I didn’t quite register this fact. I only vaguely recalled the bulky instrument.
I asked my mom to take some pictures, so I could see in more detail what I had so summarily dismissed. She very graciously took not just one, but multiple pictures, so I could see the zither from different angles. In the process of doing so, my mom noticed some writing on the underside of the zither: Hungarian handwriting, pasted on the interior wall of the wooden instrument:
I sent the pictures to my translator, who said that they were a list of folksongs: in all likelihood, these were the songs Opapa collected during the summers of 1936 and 1937.
Hiding right under our noses, just like the zither.
***
Nuts to crack:
I’m trying to track down recordings of the Palóc folksongs. Here is the full list from the underside of the zither. According to my translator, these are not necessarily song titles, but rather the first line of various folk songs:
Túl a Tiszán
Bazsa Mári
Csínom Palkó
Nagybárkányban
Nagy a feje, búsuljon …
A nagy bécsi kaszárnyában
Pántlikás kalapom
Ellőtték a jobb karomat
Gerencséri utca, végig piros …
Piros bort ittam az este
Szép a rózsám, nincs hibája
Krasznahorka …
Este van már, késő este
Általmennék én a Tiszán
Alma a fa alatt
Diófából van a…
Szilaj csikó …
Sugár magos…
Felszállott a rigó…
Göndör a hajam
Szép szivárvány [?]
Piros alma nem hittem…
Sokat arattam a…
Új a csizmám
Az alföldi…
Édesanyám minek adott
Szállj fel madár, fecskemadár
Bolond volnék, ha valaha…
Csavargónak naplopónak
Hideg szél fújdogál
Kék ibolya búsra hajtja…
Állok, állok, állok…
Rossz annak a fának
Özvegyasszony nádfedeles
Dombra nem jó…
Vetettöm ibolyát
Istenem, istenem…
Ha bemegyek a kocsmába…
Kiskertem közepén…
Jaj, de szépen kifaragták…
Ledőlött, ledőlött…
Nem megmondtam, hej te…
Béreslegény ne rakd meg a szekeret
Felszántottam, felszántottam a rimóci temetőt
Százados úr hívat az irodába
Esik eső, esik szép csendesen esik
Jaj, de sokat sírtam
Nem messze van ide Kismargitta
Megszakadt a kiskápolna…
Wow! We had that zither all those years and I never saw all that writing inside it!
Thanks, Katie!