Nemesbőd

Nemesbőd is a village in Vas county, Hungary.

Geography, geology, and demographics

The village of Nemesbőd is located in the middle section of the Gyöngyös plain, about 10 km northeast from Szombathely and adjacent to Szombathely's Zanat section. Neighboring communities include Vát, Vasszilvágy, Vép, and Vassurány. Nemesbőd is accessible via the main route 86.

Historically, Nemesbőd has offered residents an agricultural lifestyle. According to the 18th century scholar, András Vályi, "Bőd is a region of miscellaneous character, mostly planar and fertile. Its meadows are rich and well-suited to growing a wide variety of agricultural produce, crops, fruits, and poultry. The pastures are not the best, but other produce can easily counterbalance this draw-back as it is easily salable."

The scholar Elek Fényes writes that "Bőd is a Hungarian village with 654 Catholic and 8 Lutheran inhabitants. The foundation of their trade is regular trips to Vienna in order to sell homegrown poultry." In 1910 Bőd had 749 Hungarian inhabitants and the village belonged to the Szombathely district.

History

Origin of the village's name

The name "Nemesbőd" comes from the archaic Turkish noun "bő" (meaning "head of the clan"). The prefix "Nemes-" (meaning "noble") was later added to the name of the village to reflect the fact that many of its inhabitants belonged to the lower- or middle-nobility. In the 19th century there were three villages in Hungary called "Bőd". The first known record of Nemesbőd in the National Archives of Hungary comes from a 1226 document where it is referred to as "Beud". Contemporaneously, another village in Szolnok-Doboka County of Hungary's Transylvanian region (today known as Bőd or Beudiu) was known as Beud by as early as 1214. The third Bőd is described in Anonymous' Gesta Hungarorum where it is written that in the year 895 Árpád's troops crossed the river Tisza close to the present town of Csongrád at the ferry of Bőd (16 km from Kassa, and today known as Magyarbőd or Bidovce).