Kocs () is a village in
Komárom-Esztergom county,
Hungary
Hungary is a landlocked country in Central Europe. Spanning much of the Pannonian Basin, Carpathian Basin, it is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine to the northeast, Romania to the east and southeast, Serbia to the south, Croatia and ...
. It lies west of
Tata and northwest of
Budapest
Budapest is the Capital city, capital and List of cities and towns of Hungary, most populous city of Hungary. It is the List of cities in the European Union by population within city limits, tenth-largest city in the European Union by popul ...
. A site of
horse-drawn vehicle
A horse-drawn vehicle is a piece of equipment pulled by one or more horses. These vehicles typically have two or four wheels and were used to carry passengers or a load. They were once common worldwide, but they have mostly been replaced by auto ...
manufacture from the 1400s, the name is the source of the word ''
coach'' and its equivalent in other languages.
History
During the reign of King
Matthias Corvinus
Matthias Corvinus (; ; ; ; ; ) was King of Hungary and King of Croatia, Croatia from 1458 to 1490, as Matthias I. He is often given the epithet "the Just". After conducting several military campaigns, he was elected King of Bohemia in 1469 and ...
in the 1400s, the wheelwrights of Kocs began to build a cart with steel-spring suspension. This "
cart of Kocs" as the Hungarians called it (''kocsi szekér'') soon became popular all over Europe. The spread of the ''kocsi szekér'' has been linked by some theories personally to the king of Hungary
Ferdinand I, the younger brother of Charles V who became the king of Spain, Emperor of Germany, and lord of the Burgundian Netherlands, in the 16th century, and who promoted the comfortable, spring-suspended wagons among the wealthy European nobility.
A 16th-century German depiction of a ''kocsi'' without springs puts this theory in doubt, however, and it is uncertain whether the springs or some other feature were responsible for the spread of the word throughout Europe.
["coach": ''The Oxford English Dictionary''. 2nd ed. 1989. OED Online. Oxford University Press. 14 Oct. 2007] The
Thurn-und-Taxis-Post, the imperial post service, employed the first horse-drawn mail coaches in Europe since Roman times in 1650 –, as they started in the town of Kocs the use of these mail coaches gave rise to the term "coach".
In contemporary colloquial Hungarian the word "kocsi" is most often used to mean "car".
The coat of arms of the town, in addition to displaying a ram and the
Árpád stripes, also depicts an early model cart or wagon that refers to the wheelwrights' successful industry.
Notable people from Kocs
*
Mór Kóczán
Móric "Mór" Kóczán (; also known under the pseudonym Miklós Kovács; 8 January 1885 – 30 July 1972) was a Slovak–Hungarian Athletics (sport), athlete and Calvinism, Calvinist pastor. Specialized for the throwing events, his best result ...
(1885–1972), athlete and Calvinist pastor
*
Zoltán Székely (1903–2001), violinist and composer
Gallery
Image:Kocs légifotó1.jpg
Image:Kocs légifotó2.jpg
Image:Kocs légifotó3.jpg
References
External links
Street map (Hungarian)
Populated places in Komárom-Esztergom County
{{Komarom-geo-stub