betyár

betyár, a highwayman in 19th-century Hungary. The word is Iranian in origin and entered the Hungarian language via Turkish and Serbo-Croatian; its original meaning was “young bachelor” or “lad.” While most betyárok were originally shepherds, whose position in rural society was marginal, many were army deserters or young men fleeing conscription. They are first mentioned in legal documents about 1800.

Unlike their Mediterranean counterparts, Hungarian highwaymen were rather individualistic. They did not form large groups; if the number in a gang reached six or seven, they split into two or three separate units. The highwaymen of the Great Alfold traveled on horseback, while those in Transdanubia went on foot or in stolen carriages. The latter were not actually called betyárok but rather járkálók (“roamers”) or kujtorgók (“loiterers”). Their victims usually belonged to the middle classes (tenants, wealthy peasants, innkeepers, roving traders, priests), but they would occasionally attack noblemen’s manors.

Betyár crime reached its height from the mid-1830s to 1848 and again in the decade leading up to the Ausgleich of 1867. The best-known betyár in Transdanubia was Jóska Sobri, while on the Great Alfold legends grew up around Sándor Rózsa, who was portrayed as an erratic national hero. Following the Ausgleich, with the reinforcement of the hitherto highly inefficient county law-enforcement organizations, Gedeon, Báró (baron) Ráday, was made royal commissioner and charged with eliminating betyár crime on the Great Alfold. Finally, in 1881, with the reestablishment of a relatively effective rural police force, the gendarmerie, the world of the betyárok was put into terminal decline.

The betyárok became the heroes of popular fiction of the period and the subjects of folk art (betyár ballads), in which they are presented as cunning, ill-fated lovers of freedom, with their own peculiar moral code that conflicts with written laws—hence the Hungarian term betyárbecsület (betyár’s honesty).