Jassic people
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Jassic people or Jász people are an ethnic group of Hungarians that mostly live in Jász-Nagykun-Szolnok county of Hungary. They are of Ossetic origin and originally spoke the Jassic dialect of Ossetic. Today, they speak Hungarian and consider themselves ethnic Hungarians, but the sense of Jassic identity is also preserved among them.
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[edit] Geography
Jassic people live in the region known as Jászság (Jazygia), which comprise the north-western part of the Jász-Nagykun-Szolnok county. Their cultural and political center is the town of Jászberény.
[edit] History
The Jassic people were a nomadic tribe that settled in the Kingdom of Hungary in the 13th century. Their name is almost certainly related to that of the Iazyges, one of the Sarmatian Alanic tribes which, along with the Roxolani, reached the borders of Dacia (Romania) during the late first century BC. Residual elements of these tribes, ancestors of the Jász, remained behind in the central North Caucasus, mingling with Caucasian peoples to form the present-day Ossetes.
The Jassic people came to Hungary together with the Cumanians, chased by the Mongol-Tatars. They were admitted by the Hungarian king Béla IV, hoping that they would assist in fighting against a Mongol-Tatar invasion. But shortly after their entry, the relationship worsened dramatically between the Hungarian nobility and the Cumanian-Jassic tribes and they left the country. After the end of the Mongol-Tatar occupation they returned and were settled in the central part of the Hungarian Plain.
Initially, their main occupation was animal husbandry. During the next two centuries they were fully assimilated to the Hungarian population, their language disappeared, but they preserved their Jassic identity and their regional autonomy was preserved until 1876. Over a dozen settlements in Central Hungary (eg. Jászberény, Jászárokszállás, Jászfényszaru) still hold their name.
[edit] Language
The only literary record of the Jassic language was found in the 1950s in the Hungarian National Széchényi Library. The language was reconstructed with the help of Ossetian analogies.
