Bakony Shepherd’s Crook, Finished and Unfinished

Author: Magdolna Szabó

Within the rural Hungarian world, the peculiar societies of pastoralists have always been marked by a variety of special implements and tools. Indispensable among these was the staff, or crook, used for herding and driving, and also as a support. A symbol of the herdsman’s vocation, the staff went with its owner wherever he pastured his animals, while the more decorative examples were carried to markets and special events. The head of the staff was shaped in a variety of ways, including to resemble the type of animal the herdsman guarded.

The most distinctive of these was the shepherd’s crook, which ended in a hook. With uses that included the extraction of individual sheep from the flock, crooks became commonplace among Hungarian shepherds with the spread of Merino breed in the early 19th century.

The Museum of Ethnography’s Animal Husbandry and Pastoral Art Collection houses many hundreds of carved wooden herding implements, the oldest among them dating to the final third of the 19th century. The vast majority of these were either collected in the course of fieldwork when still in use, or were made to order for a particular researcher. A significant proportion represent the sorts of products marketed by Hungary’s institutionalised, post-1948 folk art cottage industries. These latter specimens, while adhering largely to pastoral woodcarving traditions, were produced as gift items, rather than as working tools.

Functional shifts of this kind, paired with the changes in approach that have transpired in the museum world, have prompted researchers—after many decades—to undertake new fieldwork among pastoralists of the modern (i.e. post-nationalisation, post-Cold War) era: to gather data on changes in the landscape, the sizes and compositions of flocks and herds, the resulting lifestyle, and the tools of the vocation; to see how pastoral families today still cling tightly to tradition; to observe the increasingly valuable knowledge they have preserved across generations; and to document how pastoral community ties and cohesive forces continue to function on a day-to-day basis.

The objects of pastoral art exhibited here are a reflection on items of pastoral art that entered the museum’s collection 70–120 years ago. The series consists of a finished 21st-century rams’-head shepherds crook alongside a number of cornel wood staves in various stages of completion. Though the finished crook was made for the researcher directly and therefore never used, the process documented by the unfinished pieces—from the gathering and preparation of the raw materials to final production—sheds light on a variety of topics, such as the herdsman’s intimate understanding of animals and nature and the network of relationships that characterises pastoral communities.

Born in 1947 in the Veszprém County village of Szentgál, Shepherd János Bartalos came from a family with pastoral roots. He kept flocks for forty-three years, starting with those owned by post-war agricultural collectives. The first time he held a shepherd’s crook in his hand was in the village of Nyirád in 1963. The materials for his crooks he gathered himself: sticks from the Cornelian cherry or European cornel (Cornus mas), a shrub that grows to heights of three to seven metres, with the roots still attached. For twenty-five years he used crooks he carved himself. Lately, however, like so many other shepherds, he has preferred ordering pieces carved in the style typical of the Bakony-Balaton region from his deft-fingered peer, János Dávid, in Nemesvámos. At the time of the museum’s collecting, everything proceeded as if he were making the staff for his own use: he selected a suitable cornel branch, kept it in its raw state, removed the bark, treated and burned the hooked root section, roughed it out, and handed over the cleaned piece for final carving.  The crook, carved from a single piece of wood—from a rooted branch—ends in a downward-facing ram’s head symbolising shepherding.  

As this series shows, the modern, multi-directional approach to museum collecting allots space not only for objects from the past, but also for material related to contemporary society and customs. Here, with regard to modern pastoralism, we discover the intimacy with nature the active and faithful members of the now-tiny community of pastoralists still possesses, catch a glimpse of their unusual experiences, observe their methods for handling raw materials, and see for ourselves the way they procure and shape the implements they use in their daily work.