The Slav is naturally a plainsman, and even in the lowlands, where he could not very well escape the force of world currents, he resisted them as long as possible, content to follow his plough for a meagre wage.
When at last the lure of the gold grew too strong for him to withstand its seductive beckoning, he went first from the great highways along the main branches of railroads, and from villages on the shores of rivers; until the ever-rising tide, with all its volume and all its good or ill, reached the mountains.
Where in straggling villages in the Carpathians the little mud-huts are detached, and scattered on top of the foothills in the midst of their stony fields, these form a Kopanicze; the individual hut is called a Kopanicza, and the inhabitants are called Kopaniczari.
They are the poor mountain folk, isolated from church and school, far from the highways of travel, and are among the most backward, most primitive, and most neglected of the Slovak people. Their isolation has often bred not only ignorance but sometimes lawlessness, and, even now, he who has no pressing business there, avoids these settlements.
Meeting a Kopaniczar on a lonely highway gives one a queer, creepy sensation. He is a raw-boned, clumsy creature, his body wrapped in a sheepskin coat, his head covered by a broad, felt hat, soaked in grease, his feet encased in woolen boots; all his garments of the most primitive home manufacture. He looks more ferocious than he is; for unless heavily under the influence of alcohol, which does not easily affect him, he is a good-natured human being. His superstition and his ignorance, however, coupled with his intemperance, make him often dangerous, as is seen by the following incident which took place last year.
A great many fires of incendiary origin occurred in one of the settlements, and as no satisfactory clue to the perpetrator was found, they were supposed to be the work of evil spirits. Fire in one of these settlements is especially disastrous; for as the huts are built of exceedingly inflammable material, everything is consumed. Such a house usually includes in its primitive possessions a horse or a cow, and when these are destroyed, it spells utter ruin.
One day a tourist came into this Kopanicze, the first of his kind who had ever ventured into that isolated region. Being a tourist, he naturally carried a camera, and as he levelled it upon the buildings, the peasants, conceiving the insane idea that he was marking their huts for destruction, ran out and beat him to death.
A boyhood friend of mine was appointed district physician in the upper Trenczin district, the most poverty stricken in Hungary, largely populated by these Kopaniczari. He was a Jew without powerful protection, and one way of getting rid of surplus Jewish physicians was to put them in charge of one of these regions, in which they were sure to be out of the way of some Gentile aspirant for a large and lucrative medical practice.
My friend had travelled the usual long and thorny road which a poor boy has to travel in striving after a university education. His parents, who were poor, laboured and begged and borrowed; while he tutored and borrowed and begged; yet he found himself still within two years of a diploma when his parents died.
Then he did the not uncommon thing; consulted a marriage broker, who found a marriageable maiden with a dowry, and parents willing to advance a portion of it; so that the young man could finish his education before he led the daughter to the altar.