This year my A to Z theme is Small Town Legends. I am exploring folklore from villages and small towns around Hungary, bringing you the most entertaining bits. You can plan your next visit around them!
Oláhfalu is actually the former/colloquial name of the town of Szentegyháza in Transylvania, with a population about 6,300 (mostly Hungarian-speaking). There is a surprising number of funny anecdotes and joking folklore about the silly things people did in this town - most of which are universal legend types tailored to the locality.
Here is one of them:
The people of Oláhfalu once caught a crayfish in a stream. They weren't sure what it was, so they convened, and decided that it must be a tailor, since it had two pairs of scissors (pincers). Now that they had their own tailor, they placed the crayfish on a length of cloth to work. Wherever the wet crayfish crawled, leaving a trail, they kept cutting after it, expecting a pattern. In the end, with the animal meandering all over the place, the length of cloth was ruined.
The people of the town convened again, and decided the tailor should be punished for deceiving them. They didn't want to commit murder, so in the end, they thought it was best to drown the criminal - and tossed the crayfish into the river.
(Collected by Duka János in the middle of the 20th century)
Fun fact: This story type exists about various villages all over Hungary and Transylvania. There are also countless similar stories where the inhabitants of a village don't recognise an everyday object. My own grandfather used to tell a story about the neighboring village were people tried to beat a muff to death, thinking it was an animal.
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