Folk martial arts culture in the Barkóság

The Hungarian people are originally a warrior people, thus possessing a characteristic martial body culture. We distinguish two directions of martial body culture: folk and military martial body culture. Basically, both stem from the same root, and later, after a certain age limit, they split into two. ; The topic of our research is folk martial body culture, which primarily contains childish virtuous elements that develop martial skills, and provide a rudimentary form, spots as another possibility. We can also approach folk martial body culture from two sides: shepherds and peasants (not shepherds). We highlight shepherds because certain tools, such as sticks, forks, hoop whips, etc., were used primarily as work tools, but during their everyday use they were also used as weapons, if the occasion arose. In light of all this, their use continued and was passed down through adulthood, while peasants generally abandoned these war-like games after they outgrew their childhood. ; Our collection area was the Barkóság in the Uplands, which we defined uncertainly. We used Attila Paládi-Kovács's work Barkóság és népe as a guide, in which he explains several points of view on the Barkó villages. We tried to choose a middle ground, so Gömöralmágy, Dobfenek, Gömörpéterfala, Jeszte, Gesztete and Détér were taken into account. We asked individuals of different ages from these areas. It became clear which games had changed over time due to external influences, which ones had disappeared by now, and which ones might be developing in a new way. ; The researched material specifically focused on Hungarian folk wrestling forms, hoop whipping, stick use, fokos, archery, throwing games and the knife theme, which we determined by processing the data of 28 informants.