WE HAVE learned only slowly about the history of the many villages in the Záhorie region – perhaps because the Hungarian kings made Záhorie a buffer zone against raids from beyond the empire’s borders.
This whole region was sparesly inhabited mostly by barbarian tribes whose sole task was to guard the borders.
This certainly applies to the Székelys who lived in this village, Sekule. The first official mention of them appears as late as the 16th century but some records indicate the Székelys arrived much earlier.
Not much is known about the origins of the Székelys. The name is attached to Hungarians living in the region of Székely, an ethno-cultural area in eastern Romanian Transylvania.
It is possible the Székelys arrived in Záhorie some time around the beginning of the Great Hungarian empire, as reports mention them as guards of border regions as early as the 11th century.
The Székelys also resided in the Small Carpathians within the territory of today’s Trstín. In all likelihood they settled there to guard the road leading through the Small Carpathians to Moravia.
The Székelys were not the only non-Slovaks residing in Sekule. In 1634, Serbs were reported to have lived in the village, brought there from the Balkans by the Bakičs family, the local squire. It is likely that a good number of Serbs lived in the village as they built their own chapel.
In this postcard, we see how Sekule looked in the times of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
