It was here in Nagyrev, a century ago, the womenfolk began killing off their husbands en masse.
They have been called the Angel Makers.
It all began with the arrival of a woman named Zsuzsanna Fazekas in 1911.
Fazekas presented herself as a midwife.
The Angel Makers of Nagyrev during their trial in 1929.
Photo by Keystone-France\Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images.
Fazekas treated the villagers with their health problems.
Soon Fazekas gained a reputation for helping women get rid of unwanted babies.
Between 1911 and 1921, she allegedly performed as many as ten illegal abortions.
In those times in Hungarian society, arranged marriages were common.
Teenage girls were married off with older men chosen for them by their families.
Divorce was not allowed socially, even if the husband was an alcoholic or abusive.
At the same time, an Allied prisoners of war camp was set up outside the town.
The POWs were drafted to work in the fields in the absence of the men.
With their husbands away, many women got romantically involved with the young soldiers.
After the war, some of Nagyrevs men returned to the village and this made the women unhappy.
They had gotten used to their sexual freedom and no longer willed to return to a life of subservience.
They turned towards Fazekas for help.
Fazekas persuaded the beleaguered women to get rid of their burdensome husbands.
Fazekas skimmed off the toxic residue and bottled them in small vials.
Fazekas instructed the women to add the poison to their husbands dinner or coffee.
Soon healthy men began to drop dead like flies.
Parents, children and relatives too fell victim.
Some even poisoned one another.
The figures for how many people died in Nagyrev from arsenic poisonings vary wildly.
The murders went undetected for nearly two decades because Fazekas was the only doctor in the village.
Nobody questioned when Fazekas said this one died from cholera and this one from diarrhea.
Fazekas' accomplice, Susi Olah, filed the death certificates that indicated natural causes of death.
Thirty four women and one man were arrested.
In the end, eight were sentenced to death but only two were executed.
Another twelve received prison sentences.
Fazekas committed suicide before she could be arrested.
In the 1950s, historian Ferenc Gyorgyev met an old villager while in prison under the communists.
The peasant claimed that the women of Nagyrev had been murdering their menfolk since time immemorial.
The story of Nagyrevs killings is a shameful part of Hungarys history.
In 2004,BBCwent to Nagyrev to open up some old wounds.
The director spent four months in the village talking to residents, collecting facts and anecdotes.
We had a hard time getting people to talk.
The men were in the way.
Bussink discovered that there was no one single motive behind the murders.
There were a lot of different circumstances: poverty, alcoholism, unemployment, the First World War.
Lots of men came home after being prisoners-of-war, some were crippled, they were unable to work.
Nagyrev’s mayor,Istvan Burka, added: The injured soldiers came home to a severe economic depression.
It was a hard life.
For a while, however, murdering their husbands did seem to work.
The murders struck fears in the heart of Nagyrevs men.
And as Maria Gunya puts it, after this the men’s behavior to their wives improved markedly.
