THE SERBS IN LOVRA ON SZEPEL ISLAND NEAR BUDAPEST - Researcher’s Dilemmas After Initial Investigations –

Abstract

The monographic investigations of Lovra, a Serbian village in Hungary, the last on in line of the formerly Serbian settlements, where the Serbs still represent the majority of the inhabitants (60%), were initiated in October 1988. Since the research is still underway, the aim of this paper was to present not the final results, but the problems that are yet to be studied and solved. The research plan encompasses all the usual topics of the monographic investigations (population origin, immigration, history of the settlement, cultural contents and its transformation in time). However, the specific problems of an ethnic group in diaspora, such as processes of acculturation, assimilation, cultural homogenization of the heterogeneous immigrants in Lovra itself, and further, the ways of maintaining contacts with the home land, and, especially, of defining, preserving and loosing ethnic identity of the group in different ethnic and cultural surroundings, are particularly emphasized. The research, time wise, focuses on the 20th century and draws data primarily from oral sources (more precisely, the data corpus is constructed on the information collected in the process of ethnographic field work), but also from written documents – church record books covering vital statistics and censuses. The Serbs in Hungary represent today only a very small ethnic community, the number not exceeding 5000 members, which is besides effected by the low natality rate, spontaneous assimilation, and overall modernization endangering the former strongholds of ethnic identity – traditional culture and the Serbian Orthodox religion. All these processes can be observed in Lovra as well, so that it may be stated that its inhabitants are definitely at the turning point in respect to their future maintaining of ethnic identity. Therefore, it is highly probable that it was the last moment when the researches of the kind were at all possible and worthwhile.