In the age of stake-legged furniture, when the legs of furnishings were still driven into the earthen floor, the only movable piece of furniture in the house—apart from small stools—was the „gúnyás szekrény”, the chest in which clothes were kept. It had to be portable, since at her wedding the bride carried her trousseau in it to her new home; at the same time, it was made with fairly high legs so that, in a house with an earthen floor, the clothes stored inside would not become musty with damp. As on the Great Hungarian Plain, in Sălaj this chest was known as a „szekrény”, a word derived from medieval Latin scrinium, used in the sense of “coffin”, rather than by the Transylvanian Hungarian term „szuszék” or Romanian names such as „lădoi” and „sâsâiac”.

In every village of Sălaj where beech woods were available, each man would make such a chest for a daughter of marriageable age using his own tools. He first fashioned the legs, then fitted the hewn boards between them like the horizontal timbers of a wall—that is, like the infill members set between the upright posts of a house. These old homemade chests were quite small, with flat lids and roughly executed ornament: linear patterns composed of straight lines, V- and X-shapes, and circles.

The Slovaks settled in the Plopiș Mountains for forestry work produced beechwood chests and large grain-storage chests in considerable numbers, particularly at Valea Târnei, selling them mainly at the fairs of Negreni), Aleșd, Zalău, Șimleu Silvaniei, and Sărmășag. The long, low chests with flat lids made there were known to their buyers as „hosszúláda” (long chest), or „tótláda” (Slovak chest). Other well-known chest-making centres nearby were the Romanian-inhabited villages of Băița and Varța Mică, in the Codru uplands, and Sângeorgiu de Meseș and Preuteasa, in the Meseș Mountains.

In the villages of the Sălaj Basin, the Hungarian rural population was gradually able to replace its rudimentary homemade furniture with pine-board furniture made by village and town joiners. The first piece of such joiner-made furniture was the painted chest, which by the first half of the nineteenth century had already largely displaced the older „szekrény” hewn from hardwood throughout the region.

Like the old szekrény, the painted chest was a customary possession of a newly married woman, brought by her as a bride to her husband’s household. It contained almost her entire dowry: usually three shirts, three linen underskirts (pendely), three skirts (fersing), three aprons, one printed-cotton jacket with sleeves, one black „huszárka” or hussar-style short jacket, one colourful fringed shoulder shawl (zsalikeszkenyő), and one cashmere headscarf, together with six, nine or twelve pillowcases, two feather mattresses, one feather duvet for covering herself, two sheets, one blanket, eight sacks, and two or three shoulder bags. Her dowry was completed only by the bridal clothes she wore and by a small plot of hemp, so that—as the people of Deja explained – “whatever she did not receive from home, she could make for herself.”

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