Nagykozár (historically spelled Nagy Kozár; ; or Kossar) is a village in Baranya County, Hungary, just west of Pécs, the county capital; its local council also represents neighboring Bogád and Romonya. Traditionally, most of the village inhabitants were either Croats or Danube Swabians, with Hungarians in the minority. The area entered history as a portion of the Hunnic and Avar domains, and, during the Hungarian conquest, was likely colonized by Khazars of the Kabar tribe, who may be the source of its root name (Kozár). The locality itself was reliably attested in 1332, only to be ransacked two centuries later by the Ottoman occupiers. The South Slavic population fluctuated during the Habsburg reconquest, when "Rascian" colonists gave way to Šokci, who came to view thelselves as a Croat subgroup. Later in the 18th century, Nagykozár was a target for Swabian colonization.
Within the Hungarian partition of Austria-Hungary, the village functioned as a hub of the Pannon wine region (though with fluctuations caused by pests), and also provided wagoners for coal extracted in the nearby Mecsek range. Baranya's minorities became exposed to Magyarization, either voluntary or state-enforced; Nagykozár had one of the few regional state schools, which acculturated Croats and Swabians into the mainstream. Upon the end of World War I, the entire region was under a Yugoslav occupation, then briefly administered by the left-wing "Baranya Republic", and finally recaptured by Regency Hungary. The latter conservative entity re-initiated Magyarization, while also repressing peasant unrest. The village surrendered to the Red Army during the Budapest offensive, with only some Swabian resistance; local Swabians were largely spared deportation during the mass expulsions of 1945–1948. The Croats, meanwhile, were closely supervised by the postwar communist regime during the Tito–Stalin split of 1948–1953.
Beginning in the 1960s, when Hungary took up "Goulash Communism", Nagykozár's co-operative was at the forefront of an agricultural boom, experienced throughout Baranya. Relative prosperity came with an increased drive toward assimilation, which the authorities hoped to discourage by financing Croat and Swabian cultural bodies. Voluntary Magyarization was enhanced upon the end of communism: by 1996, Nagykozár had begun functioning as a suburb of Pécs, with new arrivals vastly outnumbering the more established local families. Though Croats and Swabians, taken together, only account for a quarter of the resulting population, they continue to maintain a cultural profile, and have distinct political representation.
Geography Like Pécs, Nagykozár is located at the foot of the Mecsek. Actor György Barkó, who lived some of his final years in the village, selected it because it resembled his hilly birthplace in rural Transylvania, rather than the Great Hungarian Plain. The village is additionally close to the Villány Mountains (located to its south), and as such sits on a rhyolite unit named after its central spot, Vokány. Newer layers of soil belong to the "Cserdi Formation", presenting as Permian-era molasses with no known fossils.
The industry-adjacent area was traditionally supplied by a large number of springs, though most have dried up or were heavily polluted—requiring water to be brought in from the Danube and the Pécsi-víz. The Vasas-Belvárdi stream, which flows through that sector of Baranya, feeds into thermal waters and is thus protected from household usage. As such, in 2003 Nagykozár has asked Pécs municipality for additional water rights, in order to expand its own sewage system.
History Origins According to archeologist Attila Kiss, the present-day locality may have had a Hunnic presence during the Migration Period. This hypothesis hinges on the notes left in 1900 by the engineer Antal Szinink, who discovered a trove and a burial ground (that he identified as "Turkic") on the village side that is closest to Uszög field, itself a known site for Hunnic finds. Nagykozár's site was briefly occupied by the Pannonian Avars: Pécs's Janus Pannonius Museum preserves Avar items found on village grounds, namely a golden fibula and silver earrings.
The village name is widely thought to derive from the Khazars, some of whom had joined in the 10th-century Hungarian migration to the region. Based on accounts in the 14th-century Chronicon Pictum, scholar Árpád Kerékgyártó proposes that Baranya region was settled by the Kabar tribe of Khazars; he also notes that the colonization is attested in local names, including those of Nagykozár and its southwestern neighbor, Kiskozár. The theory is questioned by historians Jeromos Balatinácz and András Csepely-Knorr: though they agree that Baranya was once in the Khazar domain, they describe the locality's name as inherited from the earlier Pannonian Slavs. These two authors suggest Nagykozár owes its name to the Slavic Koazt fort, located just outside its borders.
The existence of "Kozár" was probably first noted in 1058, during the during the Árpádian Kingdom, alongside a satellite hamlet known as Sevenye (or Zsiminye). This mention is preserved through the records of a 1402 dispute between the Diocese of Pécs and the Order of Saint Paul. According to historian Béla Németh, the mention is reliable, as is its description of Nagykozár as a royal estate of Peter Orseolo. Relying on copies purporting to be 11th-century doculents, Németh argues that both localities were at the center of life in the old Baranya county. In Németh's reading, they contributed to repairing Pécs Cathedral after a great fire in 1064. Nagykozár itself was also mentioned in the Angevin era: its name appears as Kozár in the tithe census of 1332. The place was conquered, then depopulated, during the period of Ottoman subjugation. The Ottomans brought in small groups of Serbs, known historically as "Rascians", with Nagykozár as the northernmost point of their colonization. In the tax registers (defterler) of the 1560s and 1580s, "Nagy Kozar" appears as attached to the Sanjak of Mohács, with some 20 households. Under foreign domination, the more radical currents of Reformation, fostered by the Transylvanian principality, could take hold in and around Pécs. During the 1570s, Nagykozár's population appears to have been won over by the Unitarian Church. In the late 17th century, during the final stages of the Sanjak's existence, Nagykozár and Újhegy formed an estate owned by Mostar Beğ of Pécs. He allowed the peasants to use his pastures and orchards, but forbade them from plowing. Koazt was meanwhile used by the Ottoman Army, and survived into at least the 1840s.
Habsburg Hungary took control of the area during the Great Turkish War. The Siege of Pécs was organized by Louis of Baden-Baden in November 1686, chasing the Ottomans from Transdanubia. Baranya remained secured as a Habsburg province during Rákóczi's War of Independence (1703–1711). It was frequently devastated by the Kuruc and the Imperial Army alike, which prompted several locals to declare their nostalgia for Ottoman rule. In that context, those inhabitants who claimed ancestral rights and privileges as Hungarian nobility engaged with the Habsburg government in peaceful litigation, rather than siding with the Kuruc in open revolt. At the general meetings of the nobility in and after 1710, Nagykozár was represented by János Bana; in 1717, he increased his possessions, and consolidated his political standing, by buying off much of the village's remaining land. At the time, Baranya and its neighbor county of Tolna were engaged in a territorial dispute over a strip of land that included Nagykozár.
Nagykozár's attested population 1700 was still "Rascian", but it is likely that the place was again empty after the Austrian war of 1716–1718. Upon the subsequent Habsburg consolidation, the area was resettled by other categories of South Slavs. The village, known in the 18th century primarily as Veliki Kozar or simply Kozar, had a Slavic majority, generally classified as Šokci, with a small Hungarian presence. The latter was marginally enforced in 1721–1722 by five families of settlers: Kovács, Berzencei, Tot, Szarvas, and Lukács. Germans arrived in the mid-18th century, during a state-sponsored colonization of "Swabian Turkey". In 1796, Nagykozár was granted its own seal, later used as the basis for its coat of arms.
Habsburg-era modernization
The centralized Austrian Empire liberated the serfs of Hungary in the 1860s. In Nagykozár, the resulting land disputes were only resolved by a superior court ruling in 1862. After the self-governing Hungarian entity had been created within Austria-Hungary, the village had 931 inhabitants, the plurality of whom were Šokci or Croats. In 1886, they were visited by writer Nikola Tordinac from Croatia-Slavonia, who recorded their customs in a monograph and commented favorably on their high literacy rate (but also, more pessimistically, on their voluntary Magyarization). After the start of coal mining in the Mecsek range, the village Croats also went into the business of transporting and selling coal. Nagykozár participated to the economy with vineyards, included in the Pannon wine region. In 1876, its wine production suffered major destruction following infestation by moths (Sparganothis pilleriana), though it still large vineyards, alongside meadows, or csairék, during Tordinac's stays. Towards the end of the 19th century, grapes were still cultivated on the hills facing Uszög, but were later replaced with wattles. The fields extending between Nagykozár and Pécs's Luft-kolonia suburb was used for military exercises by the Common Army's 52nd regiment and the local home guard. In September 1892, these were personally reviewed by Franz Joseph I, the King of Hungary.
In 1884, Nagykozár's sixty-some schoolchildren were nominally enlisted at the village Catholic school, but no teachers were present. The situation was reviewed with indignation by Pécsi Figyelő newspaper, which noted that the village instead had four active taverns, since many landowners were putting to use their liquor licenses. An office of the Magyar Posta opened in Nagykozár in January 1898. In January 1902, the local agriculturalist Béni Liebbard reported that wine production was improving for the first time with the planting of American rootstock. From 1900, Nagykozár was one of only five villages in Baranya to have a non-religious, state-sponsored school. The choice is explained by historian László Szita as having to do with its multiethnic population, which government intended to fully Magyarize, but also as doing little to overcome the "backwardness" of the place. Nagykozár made the national news in early 1904, when a local man, Stipo Brandic, roasted his infant child on an open flame, before being seized by other peasants.
Also in 1904, the Interior Ministry changed the locality's official name into Nagykozár, declaring that variants such as Nagy Kozár were obsolete. A portion of the village Hungarians was by then seeking new social and economic opportunities by emigrating to the United States—and thus ignoring warnings from Hungarian nationalists. These argued that the New World was a mirage propped up by political agents, and that: "in Hungary and especially in Baranya, the diligent, hardworking, thrifty person can still make a living." Nagykozár and Romonya were only served by a dirt road leading to Kiskozár. Its maintenance was a point of contention with Baranya's county officials, who refused to finance the project (while observing that Nagykozár's inhabitants had no money to spare on such works). Nagykozár was considered as a station on the 1905 blueprint of a state railway linking Pécs to Pécsvárad and Bátaszék. By 1909, the project had been altered, with the planned station moved north, to Hosszúhetény.