Wedding customs of Romanians in Uzdin and Seleus, in the light of unknown Hungarian ethnographic works from the beginning of the 20th century

Abstract

One of the most cited pieces of Banat?s native history is certainly the Torontal County monograph by Dr. Borovszky Samu, published in Budapest in 1912 in Hungarian, which is one of the comprehensive analyzes of the history of Banat settlements, and also one of the first summary reviews of the ethnography of the peoples of this region, including Romanians. When collecting ethnographic material in the field, Borovski compiled detailed ethnographic questionnaires with 44 important questions, and sent them to the settlements in Banat, to the local notaries, to make sure that they complied, and to return the completed ones for analytical processing. The result of the collection of these data was surprisingly richer than expected, and in the ethnographic part of the monograph he edited, he managed to process it only briefly, so to speak, in the notes. Thus, his legacy includes a detailed collection of ethno-material, which was largely unprocessed in detail, and is now preserved in the Ethnographic Museum in Budapest. From this collection of completed ethnographic questionnaires, we have researched those relating to the wedding customs of Romanians in Uzdin and Seleu?, collected in 1911, which are part of the first systematic ethnographic processing of Romanians in Banat. The purpose of this work was to draw the attention of the expert public, especially the ethnographer, to this important, but largely unknown, ethnographic material.