Folia archeologica 22.

Gervers-Molnár Vera: A sárospataki bokályos ház

THE TILED HOUSE AT SÁROSPATAK In many 17th c. documents, a room in the palaces of the Transylvanian princes at Gyulafehérvár, Sárospatak and Gyalu is referred to as "tiled house" („bokályos ház"). These rooms have long since disappeared and even the meaning of their name-"tiled house"-was forgotten. In the 20th c., linguistic research established that the name referred to the most important room of the Transylvanian princes, the audience hall of the palaces, and that these rooms were decorated with Turkish tiles. Actual fragments of these tiles have been found only in the castle of Sárospatak. During the excavations of 1949-50 and of 1963-65, they were discovered in such quantity that it was possible to make a reconstruction representative of the whole. The excavations brought to light two kinds of tiles closely related in their decoration. The larger ones measure 25 X 2 5 cm while the smaller measure 11,5 X 25 cm. They were made from a stone-like, slightly pinkish-white silicious mixture, coated on top with a 1 mm thick white base which provided the base for the colours. These were painted with different metallic oxides (turquoise and green with copper oxide, blue with cobalt oxide, brownish purple with manganese oxide, red with a ferrous clay known as Armenian bole) and covered with a lead glaze. Flowering branches of red pomegranates and many petalled blue flowers form the principal motif. A single unit of the composition was composed of a four-tile square. The oblong tiles were used as a border for the squares and represent similar motifs in an undulating pattern. The painting on the tiles and their workmanship in general is of good quality, but they contain such differences that one may suppose at least two artisans were employed to make them. A fragment of unspecified origin bearing exactly similar motifs (fig. 22) is to be found in the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, Canada. The tiles at Sárospatak decorated a relatively small corner-room (900 X 430 cm) on the fourth floor of the Red Tower. The room was destroyed c. 1700 and although all the tiles were removed from it, two walls remained on which the placement of the tiles can still be seen in the underlying plaster. These remains show that the walls below the vaulting were entirely covered with tiles ; the oblong ones ran around the top in a band. The vaults themselves were most probably decorated with frescoes. From written documents we know that the room was decorated with tiles between 1639 and 1644 (most probably in 1641-42) by György Rákóczi I and that the tiles were ordered from Constantinople. It is believed that the room was badly damaged by a thunderstroke c. 1700. In an inventory dated 1701 the room is mentioned as having formerly been decorated with tiles. The excavations of 1963-65 showed that renovations after this damage had been planned. The broken tiles were thrown into the bastion below the western side of the tower and it is there that they were found in 1964. The renovations were never carried out, however, for in 1702, the castle was largely destroyed by the Austrian Army. In 1703, the damaged roof of the Red Tower was removed and it may have been then that the still standing but weak outer walls of the "tiled house" fell down, carrying with them further tile fragments which mixed into the fill of the bastion. Similar wall tiles were important and typical of Ottoman-Turkish monu-