Hungarian village remembers "charming" Sarkozys

ALATTYAN, Hungary, Jan 20 (Reuters) Nicolas Sarkozy has fans far beyond France.

Take Alattyan, a small Hungarian village, which is rallying behind the French presidential candidate.

''We're really rooting for him, I hope he wins,'' said Lajos Mosonyi, the village historian.

Alattyan has every reason to love the Sarkozy family. They held lands nearby and Nicholas' father, Pal, along with his brothers, spent summers in the town when they were young.

''They were handsome, charming boys,'' said Jusztika Ivanics, who worked until 1945 on the Sarkozy estate in the village of 2,000 people located 80 kilometres southeast of Budapest.

''In the evenings, the boys rode around town in their carriages and chased and kissed girls,'' she said, describing Pal and his two brothers.

The Sarkozy boys spent much of the year in Budapest and the summers with their great uncle, Lajos Toth-Maar in Alattyan, where they were thrilled by his collection of Oldsmobile cars and spent hours playing cards, Mosonyi said.

But life was not all glamour. Although the family won noble status in 1628 under the Habsburgs it remained minor nobility and was far from wealthy.

''We weren't rich,'' said Mariann Sarkozy who lives in a small flat in Budapest and is Nicolas' last relation bearing the family name in Hungary.

''We lived well, Pal's father had a very respectable job as city councillor in (nearby) Szolnok. We were middle class but we had no wealth at all,'' Sarkozy said.

Most of what the family had was inherited by Pal's grandfather and spent to provide apartments for his children.

''And even that was gone in the war,'' Mariann added.

MANSION TORN DOWN Their mansion in Alattyan was torn down in 1930 and the Sarkozys then spent their visits in the Maar mansion, which was looted and then confiscated by the communists in 1948.

''We had parties and dances in the mansion in the 1950s. The first television was also put in there and we went to watch TV in the mansion,'' Ivanics said.

Farmers from the co-op then used the wooden beams for firewood and only a few crumbling farm buildings are now left.

The family was largely forgotten in the turmoil of post-war Hungary and decades of communist oppression that followed.

''We only discovered their crypt when Nicolas gained fame and people started looking for his roots,'' said Imre Felegyhazi-Torok, director of Szolnok cemetery where the family is buried.

Pal fled Hungary at the end of the war partly due to fears the police were looking for him and, according to Mariann, partly out of adventure.

''Legend has it that Pal found a corpse by the river bank and sneaked his identification papers into the man's pockets,'' said Mosonyi.

His journey through Austria and Germany took him to France where in 1949 he married Andree Mallah, leaving her when Nicolas was a small boy.

Critics say that current immigration regulations pushed through by Nicolas, who will run in the April/May election, would have prevented his father from becoming French and even Mariann Sarkozy has some criticism for the family's efforts to distance itself from its immigrant past.

''It's a shame Nicolas doesn't speak Hungarian, how can this be? It's part of him,'' Mariann said.

REUTERS SY KP1011