While chairs with backs and arms, turned elements, curved legs, painted decoration or upholstery had already gained ground in the homes of the lesser nobility and the burgher classes by the seventeenth century, among the peasantry – both in Transylvania and in the lands beyond the Meseș Mountains – rudimentary forms of chair that could readily be made at home, with their legs fitted and wedged into bored holes in the seat, survived until comparatively recent times. In the villages of the Sălaj Valley, only hardwood chairs of this type were in use until the end of the nineteenth century.

A board 2–3 cm thick and measuring approximately 18×32 cm was split from a block of oak and adzed smooth. Four holes, each about 2 cm in diameter, were bored into it, and into these were tightly wedged oak legs 25-30 cm long, hewn to an octagonal section and tapering towards the ground. This was the ordinary portable low stool used for sitting around the hearth. The washing stool (mosószék), the laundry-beating stool (sulykolószék), and the bench for water vessels (vízpad) were larger, while the long stool or bench (hosszúszék) and the long backed forms known locally as karosszék and karoslóca could reach a length of 1.5-2 metres.

Long backed seats of another early type must also have been in use in Sălaj, their horizontal backrests supported by uprights mortised into the seat board. From the 1890s onwards, three or four single backed chairs of similar construction were made for use around the household table. Their fiddle-shaped backs, reflecting Rococo influence, were locally known by the terms karos or karszék.

The seat, approximately 40 cm above the ground, consisted of a roughly trapezoidal board 3-4 cm thick. A through-mortise was cut into it to receive the tenon of the backrest and the end of the tenon projecting beneath the seat was secured by a wooden peg driven crosswise through it. In the centre of the upper part of the backrest there was usually a heart-shaped hand-hole, allowing the chair to be lifted with one hand. The scrolling contours of the back and the curves of the seat likewise made the chair easier to grasp.

Whereas the earliest examples of this chair type were still carved from hardwood root wood, its latest representatives were already joiner-made pieces sawn from pine boards. After the Second World War, these in turn were largely displaced by upright-backed chairs of rail-and-slat frame construction, in many places with turned legs and turned elements in the back.

Dr Károly Kós, Hungarian Folk Art of Sălaj (1974)