Kocs

Kocs
Aerial view
Flag Coat of arms
Kocs Location of Kocs
Coordinates: 47°36′24″N 18°12′55″E / 47.60668°N 18.21536°E / 47.60668; 18.21536Coordinates: 47°36′24″N 18°12′55″E / 47.60668°N 18.21536°E / 47.60668; 18.21536
Country	Hungary
Region	Central Transdanubia
County	Komárom-Esztergom
District	Tata
Area
• Total	58.32 km2 (22.52 sq mi)
Population  (2015)
• Total	2,519
• Density	43.07/km2 (111.6/sq mi)
Time zone	UTC+1 (CET)
• Summer (DST)	UTC+2 (CEST)
Postal code	2898
Area code(s)	34
Motorways	M1
Distance from Budapest	76.3 km (47.4 mi) East

Kocs (Hungarian: [kot͡ʃ]) is a village in Komárom-Esztergom county, Hungary. It lies west of Tata and 65 km (40 mi) north-west of Budapest.

History[]

Kocs is best known internationally as giving rise to the English word coach^[1] and its equivalents in nearly all European languages, for example: Czech kočár, Slovak koč, German Kutsche, Dutch koets, Catalan cotxe, Italian cocchio, Spanish, Portuguese, and French coche, Scandinavian kusk.

During the reign of King Matthias Corvinus in the 15th century, the wheelwrights of Kocs began to build a horse-drawn vehicle 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.^{[citation needed]} 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.^[2] 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".^[3] 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[]

• Mór Kóczán (1885–1972), athlete and Calvinist pastor
• Zoltán Székely (1903–2001), violinist and composer

Gallery[]

References[]

External links[]

• Street map (Hungarian)

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