Bekecs

Bekecs is a village in Szerencs District of Borsod-Abaúj-Zemplén County. Its population in 2024 was 2206.

Bekecs is located at the junction of the Zemplén Mountains and the Great Plain, 32 kilometers east of the county seat Miskolc, in the Tokaj wine region. The southernmost part of the village is flat, while the northern part is built at the foot of Nagy Mountain, one of the westernmost mountains of the Zemplén Mountains.

The settlement, which was built along an important trade route, is already mentioned by Anonymus. It was probably named after its 12th century owner, the Beke family. The village was destroyed during the Tatar invasion and the Turkish rule, but it was always repopulated. When the Reformed church of the village was consecrated in 1625, Albert Szenczi Molnár visited and spoke here. From the 19th century Bekecs was no longer an independent settlement, it belonged to the neighbouring village of Legyesbénye, and after the World War II to Szerencs. It became independent again in 1956.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, a small Jewish community lived in the village, in 1880 109 Jews lived in the village,^[1] most of whom were murdered in the Holocaust. The community had a Jewish cemetery.^[2]

In 2022, 92.1% of the population identified as Hungarian, 1.2% as Roma, 0.2% as German, 0.1% each as Ukrainian, Slovak, and Rusyn, and 2.3% as other non-local nationalities (7.9% did not respond; due to dual identities, the total may exceed 100%). Regarding religion, 32.6% were Roman Catholic, 17.3% Reformed, 8.7% Greek Catholic, 0.3% other Christian, 0.2% Lutheran, and 6.2% non-religious (34.1% did not answer).^[3]