Vörösegyházi-kereszt – Vörös-köröszfa

A helynévi motiváció egy sajátos továbbélése

Absztrakt

Vörösegyházi-kereszt ‘cross of the red church’ – Vörös-körösztfa ‘red cross’: A special case of surviving place-name motivation

The geographical name Vörösegyház ‘red church’, the name of a field belonging to the village of Gyulaj (Tolna county) indicates the actual place of the settlement in medieval times. The name refers to a church building, whose brick walls, having been left bare, were red. Today there stands a wooden cross in the field with a tin corpus painted red. The cross known as Vörös-keresztfa ‘red cross’ appears already on a map prepared after 1860. Red crosses by the wayside were usually named for the red paint used to protect their constructions; in this case, however, it was because of the red walls of the church (which, as archaeological observations prove, stood only a couple of meters from today’s cross) that the corpus (and previously perhaps the whole cross) had been painted red.