Between the Woods and the Water by Patrick Leigh Fermor

path; I was struck by the place-names scattered beyond the east bank: Kúncsorba, Kúnszentmartón, Kúnvegytöke, and so on. The first syllable, it seemed, meant ‘Cuman’ and the region was still known as Nagykunság or Great Cumania. On my side of the river, a slightly different profusion spread southwards: Kiskúnhalas, Kiskúnfélegyháza, Kiskúndorozsma. ‘Kis’ means ‘little’: they belonged to the region of Kiskunság or Little Cumania.
    So this was where the Cumans had ended up! And, even closer to my route, lay a still more peculiar paper-chase of place-names. Jászboldogháza, for instance, only a few miles north; and a bit farther afield, Jászladány, Jászapáti, Jászalsószentgyörgy, and many more... Here the first syllable recalled a more unexpected and still hoarier race of settlers. In the third century BC , the Jazyges, an Iranian speaking branch of the Sarmatians mentioned by Herodotus, were first observed in Scythian regions near the Sea of Azov, and some of them made their way to the west. They were allies of Mithridates—Ovid speaks of them in his Black Sea exile—and, between the Danube and the Tisza, exactly where their descendants finally settled, the Romans had much trouble with them. We know just what these Jazyges looked like from the column of Marcus Aurelius in the Piazza Colonna. The bas-relief warriors—and their horses, right down to their fetlocks—are sheathed in scale-armour like pangolins. Javelins lost, and shooting backwards in the famous Parthian style, they canter with bent bows up the spiral.
    Had they left any other traces in the Plain? Any dim, unexplained custom, twist of feature, scrap of language, or lingeringturn of phrase? A few sparse reminders of the Pechenegs and the Cumans still flicker about the Balkans; but this entire nation seems to have vanished like will o’ the wisps and only these place-names mark the points of their evaporation. There had been a time when they scattered the hemisphere all the way from the Danube’s banks to the fogs of the Oxus and the hushed Chorasmian waste.
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    It was several days before I heard of these wild people, but I can’t resist introducing them while we are in their haunts. I learnt, too, that Jászberény, an old town due north, and one of the possible sites for Attila’s capital, still contained an old ivory horn carved from a tusk. Although it is really Byzantine work, it was once revered as the oliphant of Lehel, chief of one of the earliest Magyar tribes; his horn is as famous in Hungary as Roland’s in the West. I already knew about Charlemagne’s conquest of the Avars and I realised rather sadly that these miles on horseback were the last stretch of my itinerary still linked with the great Emperor: he had seemed to preside over the whole of the journey so far. I cursed the ignorance which had allowed me to pass Aachen without knowing it was Aix-la-Chapelle! A fully historical figure, with Alcuin of York and his court of scholars and his dates, wars, sayings and laws intact, including his strange names for the months—‘Hornung,’ ‘Ostarmonath’ and the rest—he has been touched and then transformed by a cloud of fable. Fireside mutterings, legends, centuries of bards and the lays of minnesingers have set him afloat somewhere between Alexander and King Arthur, where he looms, mural-crowned, enormous, voluminously bearded, overgrown with ivy and mistletoe, announced by eagles and ravens, dogged by wolf-hounds, accompanied by angels and oriflammes and escorted by a host of prelates and monks and paladins; confused with Odin, and, like Adonis, akin to the seasons, he is ushered on his way by earthquakes and eclipses of the sun and the moon and celebratedby falling stars and lightning; horns and harps waft him across the plains; they carry him through canyons and forests and up to steep