Wolf Mária: A borsodi földvár. Egy államalapítás kori megyeszékhelyünk kutatása - Borsod-Abaúj-Zemplén megye régészeti emlékei 10. (Budapest - Miskolc - Szeged, 2019)
Irodalom- és rövidítésjegyzék
393 Near to the sanctuary and outside of the church, a holy water font carved of crumbly rhyolite turned to kaolin was discovered. The bottom of a vessel made of white clay with thin walls and yellow glaze on the inside was found within this font. Nearly four metres from the northeast comer of the church nave, a 2 x 1 metre, 35-centimetre thick stone slab made of material similar to that of the holy water font was found. The closest analogies to this church are those structures that had stood in early county seats and deanery centres in Abaújvár, Szabolcs, Visegrád and Pata. These churches shared a common feature: they were built of stone in the middle or second half of the 11th century, their naves were rectangular, the sanctuaries generally terminated in a semi-circle and occasionally a straight wall, while their interiors were divided by piers. Although their ground plans differed in minor details, their dimensions present such a uniform picture that we can consider them typical of mid-ranked churches of the period. Accordingly, churches excavated in castles have been interpreted in historical and archaeological research as deanery churches. Therefore, it seems likely that the church discovered inside Borsod Hillfort may have been a deanery providing ecclesiastical leadership in the county. Recently it was suggested that these churches may have been royal chapels or the chapels of the counts. However, we have no information on whether counts’ chapels existed at all in Hungary. As for royal chapels, the latest research has established that the expression itself did not appear in the written sources until the end of the 13th century. Those institutions that were granted royal privileges through their affiliation with royal chapels are known only from 14th-15th century sources. Indeed, only in this period can we truly talk about privileged royal churches. ‘Royal chapel’ is thus a legal category which cannot be researched with archaeological tools. Therefore, we can immediately conclude that neither the church excavated in Borsod, nor those unearthed in other castles belonged to a special group of churches; in other words they could not have been royal chapels. Larger or smaller cemetery details were found around all of the deaneries mentioned above. Throughout its entire existence, until its destruction at an unknown time, the church within the area of Borsod Hillfort, however, never had a surrounding cemetery. In my opinion, this is because the two churches located in Borsod at the end of the 11th century had by then separate duties. The remains of the other church unearthed next to the deanery church were discovered outside the castle’s ramparts. One hundred metres to the southwest of the castle’s ramparts, on the smaller hill stands a church in its late 18л-сеп1игу form. Excavations in 1926 showed that this church may have had an Árpád-Age predecessor. Our excavations, however, clearly show that an earlier church once stood at this same location, whose details came to light on the northern side of the tower of today’s Calvinist church. We managed to unearth only a small section - the northern wall and northwest corner - of the church. The other details are located beneath the Baroque structure. We can follow the fate of the church through the rather sporadic information found in the written sources. A 1334 charter tells us its patron saint was St. Lawrence. The Árpád-Age stone church may have been destroyed at the end of the 16th century, when the village was abandoned in response to Turkish attacks. In the early 18th century, a wattle-and-daub church was built in its place, which served until the church we have today was erected at the end of the century. This church had a large cemetery around it. We unearthed 77 of the graves; their excavation, however, was limited to only the northern side of today’s church. Consequently, we could not determine the extent of the cemetery. All that is certain is that burials took place there for nearly seven centuries. According to our information from 1748, the cemetery was used even while the Árpád- Age church lay in ruins. The cemetery, as mentioned above, enclosed the church built atop the third and smallest hill located to the southwest of the hillfort ramparts. Isolated 10,h-century ceramic artefacts were discovered here too, suggesting the 10,h-century village extended to this hill before the church was erected. In the cemetery detail investigated, no wooden remains of a coffin were found. The iron nails scattered there reveal that users of the cemetery were familiar with this method of burial. It was easily observable that a portion of the deceased were wrapped in shrouds. The graves have roughly an east-west orientation; we never discovered graves with an opposing alignment. I did not find any characteristic relationship between their orientation, the periods of the burials and the depth of the graves. The majority of the skeletons were extended on their backs. In contrast, a small child was buried in a frog position. In grave 32, the skeleton of a 13- or 14-year old was placed on its belly. The positioning of the arms varied. The cemetery had been considerably disturbed; this is common in cemeteries surrounding churches, but in some cases the disturbance appeared deliberate. We observed numerous signs of superstitious customs in the section of cemetery excavated (placement of the body facing downwards, the belt undone, and the placement of sharp iron objects in the grave). The common motivation behind these actions was a fear of the deceased returning as a vampire. Among the 77 graves, we found fourteen containing various objects. With the exception of a large, iron knife, these were all clothing accessories, hoop jewellery and belt buckles. Isolated finds of roughly carved tombstones as well as a denarius minted by King Béla 11(1131-1141) were also discovered.
