Can you tell me anything about the culture of the people in this picture? One of them is my grandmother. The picture was taken in Slovakia around 1900.

9 comments

  2. Which region of Slovakia? My husband’s great-grandparents spoke Magyar and were born in the Hungarian empire, but we learned later that the place they’re from is now Slovakia.

  3. The fact they could afford and indeed got a photo of their family probably suggests that they didn’t just get by like most of the people from this region but thrived. I’m by no means an expert but since no one really answered your question about culture, I can tell you something you may even know already.
    The clothes they are wearing are ceremonial, worn on special occasions, sure some people wore folk clothes daily but judging by the ornaments, these were special clothes (just like suits for men and nice dresses for women).
    Someone here mentioned they might have been Gorals. It’s possible but not given. The name comes from the (I assume Polish) Góra which means “a hill/mountain” and they mainly lived (well, still do) around the borders of Slovakia and Poland in both countries. The culture Gorals is rich, they have their own language (probably something like a Polish/Slovak Creole), songs and customs. Just like the vast majority of people from that region they probably had their own farm.
    If you know your grandmother’s maiden name, feel free to type it here
    https://slovnik.juls.savba.sk/
    This website contains (besides Slovak dictionaries) a database of Slovak family names and it will show you in what regions most people with this name live. The database is from 1998 so almost a hundred years later, but it may still show you some interesting results.

  5. What I can tell: its either three siblings on last raw- two brothers and sister with two wives of said brothers sitting next to old guy (they are definitelly maried- as they wear “čepiec”-sort of hat, only married woman could wear) It seems that grand mother is missing- maybe allredy deceased.
    Older brother seems to be working on family farm or bussines, while Younger brother looks like better educated bank teller/clerk/teacher. that would be very fitting for pro WW1 era. Sister is still single.
    Coincidently it is plot of famous slovak movie- Tisícročná včela- Millenial bee(curently on Netflix). Yes, and Younger brother from that movie emigrated with family to USA if i am not mistaken 🙂
    Also- old guys “kroj” screams Ždiar, no doubts about it.

  6. Judging by the oldest man’s costume, these could indeed be highlander goral people. Have you ever taken an ancestry test/tried to find out which countries your ancestors came from?

  7. As far as “culture of the people” goes, in Slovakia, even though there are many historical regions*. Even though my family comes from another part of the country, there are some similarities I can talk about that work throughout the country. Also, as many others said, look up Gorals culture, there is definitely parts of that mixed in in the region.

    Most of the time in history, Slovaks were always part of some other state/nation. In 1990 it was Austria-Hungaria, basically as northern Hungary. One of the results of this is that Slovakia underwent industrialization phase only slowly and people lived in a very traditional way here for pretty long.

    Most people worked the land. As somebody here already noticed, the dress, ownership of 2 cows, having enough money to take the photo and so on and so forth all point in the direction that your family was part of the free middle class. Sure they had to work a lot, but they owned a piece of land and generally were pretty well off. No real wealth, but also no danger of poverty and hunger. By the way, in the Ždiar there is good posibility of owning some sheep.

    Land was typically inheritable and was either given to the eldest son (while the younger ones would go to get higher education and would move for work as scribe, hand of someone or something similar) or it was split between the sons. As a funny bi-product, we have a lot of weird long narrow plots of land in my country – 150 meters long and only 8 meters wide and similar.

    People lived mostly in log houses, although they were different to US style log cabins, the logs would be squared first and build much tighter. In every home there would be a brick oven for heat and cooking. Houses would have only couple of rooms, sometimes only one or two and whole families would live in this space, much more communally then we are used to today.

    Every village would typically be more or less self-sufficient. There would be some sort of mill present, church, big public bread oven, cobbler, pub, you name it. In every couple villages there would be brickwork. People rarely traveled further then couple villages/cities away. Biggest reason to travel would be to attend fair/market to buy whatever is not typically available for the rest of the year and or sell whatever is left over.

    The winters were long and cold, so people planned a lot in advance in preparation for winters, preserving food, storing firewood and so on. In winter the life got a lot slower, many tiny household works were done that were not the priority in the summer, repairs around the house and such.

    On the topic of food, we have a joke that typical Slovak cuisine consists of potatoes, wheat and should God allow, dairy. Coincidentally, I can think of and cook at least 10 different meals with just potatoes, wheat and different kinds of cheese we have (by the way, from my perspective, English is really lacking in names for different dairy products), and our national food in exactly that – bryndzové halušky [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryndzov%C3%A9_halu%C5%A1ky](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryndzov%C3%A9_halu%C5%A1ky) . Meat was for occasions only and smoking was typical conservation method. Other way how to always have fresh meat was to keep a pig in every household and when it was killed, everyone came to help and everyone got a piece of meat. This way not much was left of the pig for the owner, but they knew they would get some meat when neighbour was killing their own pig. Also, everyone did their own moonshine, typically fruit based from plums, apples, or sometimes rye.

    Most people were catholic and visiting church on Sundays. Kids got christened at around 2-3 years of age and marriage was one of the big occasions in the village life. Bride would go to grooms family after marriage and bring her dowry.

    ​

    *(this wiki [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tourism_regions_of_Slovakia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tourism_regions_of_Slovakia) has a list of “tourist regions” and a map. the division until 2004 kind of corresponds pretty well to the historical regions, even though some could be split into more smaller units. Sometime every village had it’s own special small customs)

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