Whey Dipping Cups

Author: Magdolna Szabó
Photos: Judit Kardos

These wooden cups (csorpák, cserpák, čerpak) used for dipping into and drinking the fresh whey left over from the processing of sheep’s milk were carved by the Slovak and Rusyn pastoralists of the snowcapped ranges of Upper Hungary. Usually, the cylindrical vessels—body and handle—were formed from a single piece of wood, with bottoms attached separately. Sometimes, however, the decorative handles were carved from a different, harder wood and attached with metal or wooden rings, permitting a given herdsmen to switch out one handle for another. The favoured subject matter of these pastoral carvers tended toward designs inspired by real-life, including depictions of themselves, their animals, their daily chores, and, frequently, encounters with bears and other wild beasts. These and other elements were worked into the entirety of the latticed handle in a composition that was practical for the purpose. The great variety of figural and geometric designs, with their depictions of stylised beings, fascinated Hungarian polymath Ottó Herman, who acquired an entire series of them from the Slovak and Rusyn cheesemaking herdsmen of the Liptó, Bars, Zólyom, and Szepes County highlands. The best of these were first exhibited as part of the ‘ancient occupations’ section of the 1896 Hungarian Millennial Exposition in Budapest’s Városliget Park. The accompanying catalogue offered a highly detailed description of each of the handles, the figures that appeared on them, and the scenes of real life they portrayed, with particular emphasis on the highly stylised geometric elements and the difficulty in identifying their origins. The same group of objects, accompanied by an explanation of Herman’s key historical and aesthetic findings, was exhibited again just two years later, in 1898, as part of the Museum of Ethnography’s first permanent exhibition.

The Museum of Ethnography’s 340-odd dipping cups all date to around the turn of the 20th century. The vast majority of them were collected by Herman, who presumably stumbled upon his first collection-worthy specimen while conducting fieldwork in Upper Hungary in the early 1890s. The serial appearances of the elaborately carved dipping cups before urban audiences inspired a number of collectors (Ignác Hajnal, József Ernyey) to seek them out, who donated what were probably the last pieces of this production to the museum in the early first decade of the 20th century.

The cups displayed here come from Szepes and Zólyom Counties. The large specimen—known as an odlevac—is the work of a Rusyn herdsman named Boszak from the village of Merény and is fashioned of a burned-out piece of sycamore, taken from the part of the tree near the root. The separately carved handle is attached above by means of a tooth and below using a tightened metal hoop. The decoration on the handle features a bear attacking a kneeling human figure at the top, and below them, on a separate handle in the form of a spoked wheel, a dog fleeing the scene.