Boszorkánydomb

Boszorkánydomb is the barren rise in Csongor’s garden that becomes the setting for the drama’s apple tree and, at the close, a place of remembered love and renewal. Its defining contrast is between the poor, scrubby ground that gives it its name and the tree whose beauty makes the hill a marvel. When Csongor and Tünde return to the landscape, the place is no longer merely a desolate height: Tünde identifies it as the first setting of their love, and Csongor calls for its wonder to shine there again.

The barren hill and its name

Mirígy introduces the hill while explaining the apple tree. She points out that the tree has as many branches as leaves and bears as many new wonders, then turns to the ground beneath it: the previously barren rise had yielded little beyond weeds. The name Boszorkánydomb belongs to that earlier condition, before the exceptional tree transformed the view. Its origin therefore preserves a memory of sterility even as its later appearance contradicts it.

The hill’s name and the tree’s presence hold opposing versions of the same place together. The scrubby ground explains why the rise was called Boszorkánydomb; the tree makes it a site of abundance and marvel. Mirígy’s account gives this change a strikingly unlikely cause, suggesting that the barren summit received its new growth through the sun and stars. The passage makes the tree’s arrival feel at once rooted in this particular patch of earth and touched by forces beyond ordinary cultivation.

Csongor’s garden and the enchanted tree

The rise is also part of Csongor’s garden. After the tree has become visible as a rare presence, Csongor welcomes it as a new inhabitant of the garden, likening it to an unexpected and exceptional guest. His greeting changes the emphasis from Mirígy’s explanation of the hill’s former barrenness to the tree’s place in the garden now: it is not simply an astonishing object, but a presence received into Csongor’s domain.

That welcome helps define the hill as a threshold between the commonplace and the marvelous. The site remains a piece of ground in a garden, yet the tree makes it remarkable; the garden’s new resident belongs to the landscape and seems to exceed it. The hill’s identity is thus shaped by a visible transformation, from a rise associated with meager growth to the ground on which a wondrous tree can stand.

The place of first love and return

When Csongor and Tünde reach the landscape again, Tünde recognizes the ground and recalls that it was here, on this open heath, that she first planted love. Her recollection gives Boszorkánydomb an intimate history that differs from Mirígy’s account of its name: the hill is not only a place changed by the tree, but also a place marked by the lovers’ beginning and by the fate that later swept their desire away from them.

Tünde’s recognition turns return into an encounter with both continuity and loss. The same landscape remains identifiable, but the remembered beginning carries the knowledge that their love was separated from them. Csongor responds by calling for the barren place’s marvel to stand there again and shine far away. His wish links the remembered ground, the tree’s beauty, and the lovers’ renewed presence without erasing the earlier desolation or the intervening separation.

Narrative significance

Boszorkánydomb gathers the drama’s changes into one landscape: barrenness gives way to extraordinary growth, a garden acquires a wondrous new inhabitant, and a place of first love becomes a site of return. These meanings do not cancel one another. The hill’s old name keeps its history of meager growth present beside the tree’s abundance, while Tünde’s recollection makes its renewed splendor inseparable from the lovers’ past.

The location therefore gives physical form to transformation and remembrance. Its significance lies not in a detailed geography, but in the contrasts attached to the ground: barren and flourishing, ordinary garden and marvelous setting, first love and return after separation. At the end, Csongor’s hope that its beauty will shine again makes the hill part of the drama’s closing movement toward renewal.