Kocs Explained

Subdivision Type:Country
Timezone:CET
Utc Offset:+1
Timezone Dst:CEST
Utc Offset Dst:+2
Official Name:Kocs
Subdivision Type1:Region
Subdivision Name1:Central Transdanubia
Subdivision Type2:County
Subdivision Name2:Komárom-Esztergom
Subdivision Type3:District
Subdivision Name3:Tata
Area Total Km2:58.32
Population Total:2519
Population As Of:2015
Population Density Km2:43.07
Postal Code Type:Postal code
Postal Code:2898
Area Code:34
Pushpin Map:Hungary
Pushpin Map Caption:Location of Kocs
Blank Name:Motorways
Blank Info:M1
Blank2 Name:Distance from Budapest
Blank2 Info:76.3km (47.4miles) East
Coordinates:47.6067°N 18.2154°W

Kocs (in Hungarian kot͡ʃ/) is a village in Komárom-Esztergom county, Hungary. It lies west of Tata and 650NaN0 north-west of Budapest. A site of horse-drawn vehicle manufacture from the 1400s, the name is the source of the word coach and its equivalent in other languages such as: Czech kočár, Slovak koč, German Kutsche, Dutch koets, Catalan cotxe, Italian cocchio, Spanish, Portuguese, and French coche, Scandinavian kusk, and Serbian кочија (kočija).

History

During the reign of King Matthias Corvinus 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.[1] 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".[2] 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

External links

Notes and References

  1. "coach": The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1989. OED Online. Oxford University Press. 14 Oct. 2007
  2. Book: Mackay, James . The Guinness Book of Stamps. Guinness Publishing LTD, Enfield, UK. 1988. 26.