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!
Galagonyás (Glogonj in Serbian) is a village in Serbia with about 3,000 inhabitants. Before WWI, when the stories were colected, this area was a part of Hungary. The name comes from glog/galagonya (hawthorn).
The story is a silly one:
The people of Galagonyás had a plot of land that was not being used. They asked the priest for advice. What should they plant? The priest suggested they should sow salt: it was expensive and therefore valuable, and they would do well to have their own crop. So the villagers purchased bags of salt and sowed the whole plot of land with it.
After a while, the plot of land turned green. The salt was sprouting! Or rather, nettles were growing in the field. Some of the village elders waded into the field and got stung on their bare legs by the nettle. They concluded they were going to have a good strong crop of salt. Some time later a few children decided to throw the hat of the mayor's son into the field. The villagers were not sure how to get it out without trampling the precious crops. Eventually the mayor landed on a plan: he traveled into the field on the back of an ox and fished out the hat. Then he declared that a guard had to watch the plot. In order for the guard to not trample anything he was carried high on a platform... by four other people.
In the end, even this clever precaution didn't help: the nettles were all eaten up by the guard's donkeys.
(Source here)
Fun fact: the story where someone doesn't want to trample crops so he has himself carried in by four other people is something that I heard from my grandfather too. It's one of those stories that make fun of other villages...
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