Through a Glass Darkly for October 8, 2009
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Fall is the time for festivals.
While many Louisiana towns host them, one of the most unique October celebrations is the annual Harvest Dance in Hungarian Settlement.
Hungarian Settlement is a rural community in eastern Livingston Parish. The first Hungarians arrived there in the late 1800s and went to work for a lumber company. They quickly brought over relatives and friends.
When the lumber company finished cutting the timber, the Hungarian settlers bought the land and turned it into farms that mainly grew strawberries. The settlers built churches, which still play major roles in their community, and a school, which still stands though no longer in use.
By the 1920s, 1,500 Hungarian Americans lived in Hungarian Settlement, also known as Arpadhon. Several generations of Hungarian descendants still populate the area, though many have brought husbands and wives from other places and cultures.
The Arpadhon residents take pride in their heritage and many of them still speak some Hungarian though it is a dialect trapped in time and not exactly the language now spoken in Hungary.
Local pride displayed itself Saturday at the annual harvest dance. The annual Arapadhon dance goes back generations — at least to 1921 — and has far deeper roots in the villages of Hungary.
One great thing about this festival is that it hasn’t become commercialized. Several women make palasinata — a delicious Hungarian crepe — that they sell for $1; and the crowd can devour sausage, cabbage rolls and other modestly priced Hungarian dishes. Auctioning a bottle of homemade strawberry wine helps defray the festival’s cost.
The idea of the festival isn’t to make money, but to keep alive traditions, gather with friends and have a good time. Prayers in English and Hungarian open the festival.
Talented singers perform folk songs in Hungarian.
Then dancers in traditional Hungarian festival dress — complete with handmade crowns and vests for the young women — put on a show of Hungarian dances that date back to the time when the settlers emigrated from their homeland.
At the end the sequence of superbly choreographed dances, the performers and other festival goers leap for the decorations. Appropriately for a harvest dance, the decorations are five bushels of fruit hanging overhead in individual bags.
Parents and grandparents lift wide-eyed little ones to grab apples, oranges and grapes in what is like a combination of an Easter egg hunt and the breaking of a piñata. Then, as music continues, the festival goers do their favorite thing. They gather in small groups to chat with old friends or to tell new friends the story of their settlement.
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