The ground spice paprika of Szeged can­not be treated as a sim­ple tra­di­tion­al spice. It­s his­tory goes back in time to sev­er­al hun­dred years - an­d this Hun­gari­an spe­ci­al­ity will ex­ist for at least sev­er­al cen­tur­ies from now on. The con­science an­d heart of k­ing­s, em­per­or­s, war­ri­or­s, ar­is­to­crat­ic ladies, peas­ant­s an­d s­ci­ent­ist­s wro­te this story.

The dis­cov­ery of the paprika

The story be­gin­s with Isa­belle I., Span­ish queen, who ac­cep­ted the dar­ing an­d au­da­cious plan of Chris­topher Colum­bus an­d sup­por­ted his voy­age to the In­dies. On his re­turn from the New World, On his re­turn from the New World, Colum­bus, in­stead of the tra­di­tion­al spices, brought a p­resent that was nev­er seen be­fore: a cap­sic­um plant. It is no ac­ci­dent that it was Colum­bus' doc­tor (Chan­ca) who picked the plant - he had to feel that with­in a few cen­tur­ies it­s cur­ing ef­fect would bring him fame.

At the be­gin­ning the plant was a dec­or­a­tion in the Baroque gar­dens of the European ar­is­to­crat­ic castles. As a res­ult of trade re­la­tion­s it reached Tur­key. The cap­sic­um plant, strong as pep­per­, was brought to our coun­try by the Turk­ish jan­is­sary.

The ap­pear of the paprika in Hun­gary

In the second half of the 16th cen­tury an ar­is­to­crat­ic lady, Mar­git Széchy, a re­l­at­ive of the Hun­gari­an roy­al fam­ily, dec­or­ated her garden with a plant c­alled "red Turk­ish pep­per­"(vörös török­bor­s). At that time the plant was named af­ter it­s pre­sumed ori­gin­s, it was also c­alled "In­di­an pep­per­" (in­di­ai bor­s) or "pa­gan pep­per­" (­po­gánybor­s). The name "paprika" ap­peared in writ­ten re­cord­s first time in the 18th cen­tury - it comes from the South­ern Slavic ter­m: "papar".

The paprika of Szeged

The first doc­u­ment from Szeged men­tion­ing the word "paprika" is d­ated to 1748. Later on it oc­curred also as a fam­ily name, show­ing that a lot of people star­ted work­ing with it.

The folk-ety­mo­logy of the word is not that s­ci­entif­ic. Ac­cord­ing to folk­tales, it was the priest­s - the teach­er­s