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The Historic Wine Region of Tokaj
In 1703, the Hungarian Prince Ferenc Rákóczi II presented Louis XIV, King of France, with a gift of wine harvested from his own estate in Tokaj. Thus it was that Tokaji the wine first entered the gates of Versailles, prompting the Sun King to eulogize it as “the wine of kings and the king of wines.” From there, Tokaji went on to conquer all of Europe and become the wine of choice of Tsar Peter the Great, Tsarina Catherine the Great, Frederick II, Voltaire, Goethe, Schubert, and a host of other, less distinguished mortals.Tokaj itself came under official protection in 1737, when a top-secret imperial decree declared it a restricted wine region—the first of its kind in the world. Also as a first, a classification of the region’s vineyards was adopted, in 1772. In recognition of the region’s integrity and legacy of distinct viticulture that had survived for a thousand years, in 2002 the UNESCO World Heritage Committee inscribed Tokaj on the World Heritage List as a Historic Cultural Landscape. One of the most significant communities of this historic wine region is the village of Tállya.
Tállya
Nested in the valley of the Szerencs Creek along the historic wine and salt trading road that connected Tokaj to Kassa (today Košice in Slovakia) and Tarnów, the village boasts administrative boundaries established since the Middle Ages. Through the centuries, the lands belonging to the community varied in size between 3,400 and 3,500 hectares, depending on border disputes and the prevailing pattern of pasture ownership. Tállya owes its reputation to the 16th-17th century wine boom in the Tokaj Foothills, although the local viticulture goes back much further than that. Historic sources reveal that, as early as in 1275, village residents paid the bishop a tithe after their production of wine. At the end of the 16th century, the village was acquired by Zsigmond Rákóczi, Prince of Transylvania, as part of a dowry. By then, Rákóczi had also gained control over the town of Szerencs, from where he annually sourced some 500-600 casks of wine—quite a considerable quantity—for export to Poland. Around 1650, the ruins of a former fortified castle were converted into a farmstead for Lady Zsuzsanna Lorántffy, the wife of György Rákóczi I, while the church buildings and the town itself were surrounded with a wall. Tállya and its wine enjoyed a time of prosperity through the 17th century owing to a combination of factors, including the periodic replacement of dwellers, a unique blend of ethnicities, the frequent change of ownership in the estates, and the considerable proportion of what were known as “the extraneus”—vineyard property owners from outside the wine region proper. This latter set included quite a few aristocrats from nearby oppodiums, a special type and rank of privileged trading towns, although they were outnumbered by the well-heeled middle-class citizens of towns north of Tokaj in what is today Slovakia, such as Bártfa (Bardejov), Eperjes (Prešov), and Kassa (Košice). In those days, Tállya—boasting oppodium privileges itself—was characterized by a peculiar mix of the aristocratic mindset and an emerging middle class consciousness. The residents, habitually referred to as “the peasants” by the city council and the judge, were clearly guided by a sense of bourgeois self-identity in their own internal affairs. The social stratification of Tállya residents is readily apparent from registrar’s books, which often feature forms of address such as “respected sir” or “the revered,” allowing us to infer that many of the families belonged to the higher classes indeed. These families clearly adopted the manners and habits of “the lords and noblemen that be in Hungary” in their own lives and in the ways they went around their business. The buildings of the village, run-down though they may have become, are now being renovated one after the next, allowing the former splendor and opulence to slowly return to the community that used to be renowned for the homogeneity and high standards of its architecture.Even the farmers’ houses had stone walls and tile roofs. Beyond its remarkable built environment, Tállya is also rich in history and cultural legacy.
Among the famous protestant preachers who worked here, special mention must be made of Gáspár Károli, who first translated the Bible into the Hungarian vernacular. A number of aristocratic families were associated with the village, and it was in the local Lutheran church that Lajos Kossuth was baptized, on September 21, 1802. János Lavotta, the doyen of Hungarian verbunkos, a style of recruitment music, is buried in the Roman Catholic cemetery of Tállya. A storehouse of architectural and cultural tradition, the wine-producing community of Tállya has become a veritable outdoor museum of viticulture and part of our World Heritage. Interestingly, it also happens to occupy the geometric center of the European continent.
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