The Bullroarer Atlas

TOLNAI1920-001 - historical text

Hungarian-speaking children in Arad

Romania - Arad - Maros (Mures) embankment - Eastern Europe

Play / practical

Representative—not this record’s object: a Dutch brommer from Alkmaar.
Representative—not this record’s object: a Dutch brommer from Alkmaar. Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge (1922.393) Image source

zúgattyú Hungarian

zúgattyú = Hungarian whirring-board / bullroarer term in Tolnai’s article.

Remembering Arad in the early 1880s, Tolnai recalled children taking the zúgattyú out to the Maros embankment. Its thin board, tied to a half- to one-metre cord and sometimes worked from a stick handle, was spun in a broad circle.

Aradon ... a Maros toltesere ... hajtottuk a zugattyut.

In Arad ... on the Maros embankment ... we made the zugattyu go.

L. Tolnai, A zugattyu, Ethnographia 31 (1920), p. 114
Object
Thin board with a terminal hole or narrowed neck, on a half- to one-metre cord, sometimes with a stick handle, spun in a large circle.
Function
Children's toy
Map confidence
high - Arad city-riverfront anchor; no exact embankment site recovered.
Source location
printed p. 114

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