Let's play with Hungarian cards! They are even great as souvenirs, not very heavy and not fragile, yet something fun and typical Hungarian.
This time I'm writing about the Hungarian deck of cards.
It is called Hungarian cards (magyar kátya) and as for Hungary they are just as popular as the French deck (francia kártya).
The Anglo-Saxon name for Hungarian deck is German deck or Tell deck. It contains 32 cards (in Hungary) and shows images from Schiller's drama called Villiam Tell. (No, the apple shooting thing is not there in the standard deck.) The Aces are four seasons. Hearts, bells, leaves and acorns are used instead of hearts, diamonds, spades and clubs.
Some vocabulary:
heart - piros
leaf - zöld
bell - tök
acorn- makk
Here are the literal translations:
piros - red
zöld - green
tök - pumpkin
makk - acorn
The story behind the cards:
József Schneider and Ödön Chwalowsky, who were card painters in Pest, painted the first deck of Hungarian cards around 1835. In the 1860's these originally biedermeier style card designs were renewed in Vienna and became popular in the entire Monarchy. These Hungarian cards are used even today in the countries created form the Monarchy. They are not called Hungarian cards everyhwere. The German name for the Hungarian card is "Doppeldeutsche".
GAMES
One of the games that can be played with these cards is Schnapsen. It is Snapszli or Snapszer in the Hungarian version of the German word. Under this link you can find the rules of this game in English and a lot of extra information about the cards. (Even information that an average Hungarian person wouldn't know.)
http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/481513/the-history-of-the-hungariantell-cards
These are the Hungarian websites that I relied mostly on when writing this post.
http://kartya.blogter.hu/294337/a_magyar_kartya_napja
http://www.kartya-jatek.hu/magyar/sajat_termekek.php?id=7&azonosito=7&alazonosito=7
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