People
Balázs · Shepherd
"Nowadays it's very difficult finding new shepherds.
Youngsters are not trained and don't pay attention to all the details"
Standing on top of one of the hills that surround Keresztúr’s lake, he points at a flock of sheep grazing in the opposite slope: “that one is managed the traditional way. It’s partly like a cooperative with many owners, and they take turns to milk and slaughter the sheep in a proportional way”. His flock, on the contrary, belongs to only three people and the animals are marked to identify their owner. He owns 50 sheep,18 of which in this fold and the rest in another on in his village, in Kányád. Miklós Fazakas, the owner and his brother in law own the rest of more than 670 sheep.
Contrary to common sense, wool is just a side product from sheep breeding: Balázs shears the animals himself and sells it to a cloth factory. However, meat —and in some cases also milk— is the main product: newborn lambs are sold to Greece when they are four-five months, while older sheep are locally slaughtered when they reach an age of five or six years and their meat is still tender.
Miklós Fazakas is also the owner of all the land around Keresztúr’s Lake —and the lake itself—, and he pays Balázs both in cash and in kind: tobacco, alcohol, meet and vegetables he grows himself.
Around the lake, Miklós leases land for others to grow alfalfa and, after it’s harvested, Balázs walks the flock over the same area. It’s a symbiotic relationship: the sheep feed and at the same time clean and fertilize the land. The sheep are kept indoors during the winter and, when spring arrives, Balázs takes the flock out and walks it around the lake all summer long: there is not the tradition nor the conditions for transhumance, which requires large, continuous grazing areas, in contrast to Széklerland hills and forests.
Balázs’s main concern are bears that from time to time venture outside the forest and slaughter a sheep or two. He repeats this fear every few words. To defend the flock he counts on fifteen large, threatening dogs that bark at any sign of an outsider approaching as was the case when we first got close to the animals. The pack is led by Rigó, a black, playful dog: “he’s the smallest of them all, but he’s the most intelligent”, he affirms as he pets it. However, Balázs says that only ten dogs are not enough to defend the flock, so Miklós has just bought six more from another shepherd.
It’s 7:00 PM and the sun starts his slow descent in the sky. Balázs now directs the flock towards the lake for sheep to drink, although some of them prefer the enclosed trough in the slope. Now the animals, already close to the outdoors pen where they will stay during the night, graze for another couple of hours.
In the meantime, Balázs relaxes in the small cabin made of tin next to the pen where he keeps the essentials for his way of life: some food, a change of clothes, an old radio, tobacco, pálinka, wine… The place is barely the size of a mattress and has two wheels and a hook to move it if it’s necessary.
Late in the afternoon Miklós Fazakas shows up to help getting the flock into the pen, cleaning the dogs and healing the injured sheep.
“It’s a very quiet, calm job, but you have to pay attention and be awake 24 hours a day so bears don’t kill the flock”, concludes Balázs, reiterating once more his fear of bears.
