Balassagyarmat is the town of Balážske Ďarmoty (Slovak:
Jahrmarkt) is the second most populous town in Nógrád County, the
seat of the Balassagyarmat District and a border crossing to
Slovakia on the left bank of the Ipoly River.
Due to the
favorable location of Balassagyarmat, its area was already inhabited
during the Copper Age. During the conquest, the Gyarmat tribe, which
gave the name of the later settlement, settled here, its first known
written mention dates from 1244. During the Turkish occupation, the
castle was demolished and the city was depopulated. After several
unsuccessful attempts, the settlement was rebuilt in 1690. The
industry and trade of Balassagyarmat flourished in the 18th century,
thanks to which the county seat was moved to the town in 1770. After
the First World War, the demarcation line drawn on the outskirts of
the city was crossed by the Czechoslovak Legion in 1919, and then on
January 15 it occupied Balassagyarmat. Despite the ban of Mihály
Károlyi and the Hungarian soldiers stationed in the area, the
occupying forces were expelled armed on January 29. For the heroic
deeds of the citizens, the city was awarded the title of “Civitas
Fortissima” (The Bravest City) and January 29 became the city’s
public holiday. During the 1950 county settlement, Salgótarján was
appointed as the new seat of Nógrád county instead of
Balassagyarmat, and the county council was actually relocated in
1952.
In the 20th century,
the villages of Újkóvár, Patvarc and Ipolyszög were annexed to
Balassagyarmat, but Patvarc became an independent village again in
1992 and Ipolyszög in 2006.
The suffix of the name of the
town refers to the settlement of the tribe of the conquering
Hungarians called Gyarmat, and the prefix was obtained from its most
important owners, the Balassa family in the 15th century.
Location and geography
Balassagyarmat is located in northern
Hungary, in the north-western part of Nógrád county, along the
Slovak-Hungarian state border, in the terraced valley basin of the
Ipoly, in the small part of the Middle Ipoly Valley, on the left
bank of the river. The right coastal part of the city is now the
Slovenské Ďarmoty in Slovakia. In terms of ethnography and
ethnography, the town is located in one of the most privileged
places of the Palóc dialect, preserving many monuments of Palóc
culture. Geographically, the Balassagyarmat area consists of a chain
of young, filled depressions, bounded on the south by the Terényi
Hills and on the southeast by the Szécsényi Hills. Oligocene clay
marl was deposited on the bedrock, which mainly consists of carbon
crystalline slate, and is covered by brown soil, the dominant soil
type around Balassagyarmat. The hydrography of the area is dominated
by the Ipoly, and the significant stagnant water of the valley floor
is the Nyírjes Lakes, which stretch over 8.5 hectares next to the
town. The Égerláp nature reserve is located at the western entrance
of the city.
The main data characterizing its moderately cool
and dry climate are summarized in the table below.
History
The oldest known archaeological finds in the
Balassagyarmat area date back to the Middle Copper Age (Baden
culture). In Roman times (1st-4th centuries), the Quaids settled
here and established a trade route along the Ipoly. The suffix of
the name refers to the settlement of the tribe of the conquering
Hungarians called Gyarmat, and it got its prefix from its most
important owners, the Balassa family in the 15th century. He
colonized the Ipoly river crossing. His castle developed from a
watchtower established after the Tartar invasion. Its first known
written mention dates from 1244. It was granted the right of
Mezőváros in 1437.
He was occupied by the Turks from 1552 to
1593. At the beginning of the Fifteen Years' War, in the autumn of
1593, the Turkish guard escaped from the colony and set fire to the
castle. The Turks were finally expelled from the area in 1648 by the
rescue army of Ádám Forgách, the chief captain of Érsekújvár. From
1652 Ferenc Balassa and Imre became the chief captains of the
castle. It was occupied again in 1663 or perhaps in 1665 by the
Turks, who also blew it up this time. The settlement thus lost its
significance. During the struggles for conquest, the area became
depopulated. The resettlement of the population did not begin until
the second half of the 17th century. The remains of the castle wall
built at that time can be seen in Bástya Street.
After the
expulsion of the Turks, due to its favorable geographical location,
it was rapidly populated: it lay at the junction of a commercial
road connecting the mining towns of Upper Hungary with the
settlements of the Great Plain. As a result, a large number of trade
groups, e.g. Serbs, Jews, Germans settled here. Their memory is
preserved in the still existing Serbian church and the Jewish
cemetery. Márk Rózsavölgyi, the great figure of verbunko music, his
“csárdás father”, whose name is preserved by the local art school,
came from the Jews here.
After 1683, the county of Nógrád did
not have a permanent seat, the county assemblies took place
alternately in Szécsény, Losonc or Gács. In 1790, the seat of Nógrád
county was moved by the general assembly to Balassagyarmat, to the
vacated barracks, which became narrow after a while, so in 1832 the
county ordered its reconstruction. The new county hall, which still
stands today, was inaugurated on October 19, 1835. Balassagyarmat
was a significant commercial hub throughout the Reformation, so its
population swelled to 7,529 by the end of the Reformation. The
county prison was built in 1845, which is the oldest prison still
operating in Hungary. Sándor Petőfi turned twice during his highland
trips in Balassagyarmat. Imre Madách was a county clerk between 1842
and 1848, and Jenő Komjąhy taught here.
At the time of the
1848 revolution, the body of the revolutionary administration, the
city council, was established very early, on March 25, 1848. The
recruitment of national patrol teams also began on this day.
The dualist Balassagyarmat progressed in urbanization, but since the
market town status was abolished by the village law of 1871 (also
abolished as a title from 1886), the settlement did not undertake to
provide the necessary conditions for the orderly council city and
the extra tax, so it became a large village, and Until 1923, it
worked that way.
During the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, the
foundations of the current structure of the settlement were formed:
new settlement-like constructions (Otthontelep, Tisztviselő- és
Vasutas-settlements) were established next to the public buildings
(county and district court, county hall, etc.) erected on the main
street (today: Rákóczi fejedelem útja . The Mária Valéria Public
Hospital in Nógrád County was built at that time (today Dr. Albert
Kenessey Hospital). Architect Gyula Wälder, a later university
professor, played a major role in shaping the image of
Balassagyarmat. The beach was designed by Alfred Hajós. The city
gallery and the building of the State Police and Gendarmerie Palace
were designed by Dezső Magos (Munk), a native of the city.
At the end of the age of dualism, Balassagyarmat, as the county
seat, was primarily an administrative center, a city of merchants
and officials. Kálmán Mikszáth was a county clerk here between 1871
and 1873.
The settlement played an important role during the
First World War and the subsequent revolutions. Soldiers from
Balassagyarmat and the surrounding area, enlisted in the 16th
Infantry Regiment, ended up primarily on the Russian front,
especially many of them who fought in what is now Poland. The statue
of the 16th Army in the Heroes' Square commemorates them.
On
January 29, 1919, the occupying Czech garrison was pushed back to
the other side of Ipoly by gunmen consisting of brave volunteers
(railwaymen, soldiers, prison guards, industrial workers), which the
local common language calls Czech exile. The event is commemorated
by the Memorial Act, which gave the city the honorary title of
Civitas Fortissima (Bravest City), and in November 2009 the
local-born Gábor Matúz made a film about it. Under the influence of
the atrocities committed by the Reds during the Soviet Republic,
Técay Cécile, then living in Balassagyarmat, wrote some chapters of
Bujdosó's book.
Balassagyarmat became a border town with the
Treaty of Trianon. Its old Ipoly bridge was blown up, its stumps can
still be seen today, and a new bridge has been built ever since. Due
to the change in the flow of the river, the 1999 LXXX. The
Slovak-Hungarian interstate agreement on borders had to be amended
by TV, as the state border stretches in the middle of the riverbed.
Until 1923, the rank of the settlement was a large village, a
town with a council organized between 1923 and 1929, and then a
county town between 1929 and 1950.
Between the two world
wars, Zoltán Tildy spent his childhood in the city, and Lőrinc Szabó
lived here for a while at 10 Templom utca. In 1926, the village
of Újkóvár, formed from the border part of Kóvár left in Hungary,
was annexed here.
In February 1945, a Land Allocation
Committee was formed, which distributed land to more than 11,000
families.
In 1950, it took over the role of the county seat
in Salgótarján, although the county council was established in
Balassagyarmat and operated here temporarily until 1952, when the
operating conditions were created at the new seat. The need to
relocate the county seat was already addressed in the administrative
geographical literature between the two world wars, and was included
in several reform proposals, supported by detailed calculations.
During the 1950 county settlement, most of the villages of the
former Hont county in Hungary were annexed from Nógrád to Pest
county, together with some settlements around Vác, while the
county's southeastern border with Heves county moved from the Zagyva
river valley to the Mátra mountains. rather, its population shift
shifted eastward. Some county bodies later remained in their old
place, with the county court and prosecutor's office still operating
here. Balassagyarmat - together with the city of Gyula - is one of
the 2 Hungarian cities where city and county level courts are
located, although it is not the county seat.
Between 1950 and
1954, Balassagyarmat was a city directly subordinated to the
district council, then until 1971 it was a city with district
rights, and since then it has been a city. Although it has lost its
former administrative importance, its cultural power remains high,
provided by the large number and capacity of educational
institutions operating in the city relative to the population.
In 1973, a hostage drama that shook the whole country took place
here, during which two young men, András Pintye and László, tried to
take the residents of one of the girls' colleges (the former
institute of the English Misses) hostage and try to get abroad (see:
Balassagyarmat hostage drama).
From 1973, Patvarc and
Ipolyszög belonged to Balassagyarmat, but the former became an
independent village in 1992, and the latter in 2006 again. The city
has been the center of the Balassagyarmat micro-region since 1994,
and is also a member of the Ipoly Euroregion.
In September
2009, the local representative body - in response to László Sólyom's
atrocities on the Komárom bridge - declared the Slovak Prime
Minister Robert Fico, who was passing through the city, undesirable.
It was a scandal in the domestic press that Fico subsequently drove
through the city, accompanied by guards with submachine guns.
Pursuant to the Slovak-Hungarian interstate agreement signed on 31
January 2011, the Slovak-Hungarian gas pipeline crosses the state
border at Balassagyarmat.
In August 2012, Jobbik organized a
protest against a hostel in the city. Also from 2012, Balassagyarmat
became the district center of the Balassagyarmat district. In 2013,
after several successful tenders, Balassagyarmat won more than 1.1
billion forints for the rehabilitation of the city, during which the
Old Town Square and the main square were renewed.
For the
centenary of the 1919 uprising, the municipality organized a jubilee
anniversary year, which lasted until June 4, 2020, the anniversary
of the Treaty of Trianon.