Fügedi Márta szerk.: B.-A.-Z. megye népművészete (Miskolc, 1997)

ANGOL NYELVŰ ÖSSZEFOGLALÁS Fügedi Márta

In Presbyterian regions the national costume adapted to a bourgeois taste earlier, its colouring and ornamentation being more modest. In the villages of some Catholic areas however, a showy type of national costume reflecting a colourful peasant taste flourished which could represent age, material status and occasions with its colours, details and unique composition in a refined way. The mos valuable pieces of local fashion were the outerwear made of leather, felt and wool by craftsmen. The richly embroidered fur coats and sheepskin waistcoats, the abundantly ornamented peasant cloaks, the woollen capes got their material from the extensive stock breeding of our county, and due to the manual skills and expertise of the furriers and cloak and cape makers living in the small market towns they became gala pieces of clothes of symbolic importance as the expressions of peasant and national consciousness and were equal to real assets. In our county religious diversity and centuries long coexistence present themselves in an exceptionally rich unity. The Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Orthodox, Greek Catholic and Jewish communities often live in immediate vicinity. In the regions of mixed religions there are generally fewer sacred objects than in the regions homogeneous in this respect; it is especially with the Catholics that sacred objects as good as form sets determining and symbolizing local culture. The most widespread sacred landmarks are the crosses at the sides of the roads, these are magnificent monuments of the local stonecutting traditions in Bükkalja and the Torna karst, while cast iron corpuses aree the products of the iron foundries of Northern Hungary. The more modest financial conditions of the Greek Catholic regions are reflected in the corpuses painted on tin sheets, the so called 'Tin Christs'. From among the figures of saints kept in the homes, the painted and carved replicas of the so called Sasvár Madonna and the Pieta are widespread, they are placed on the house altar in the sacred corner of the clean room. From the beginning of the 20th century the cult of the Lourdes statue caused wooden figures to be replaced with its china and gypsum replicas. The glass and mirror paintings with religious themes came to our region from Czech areas and became popular in the Catholic parts, which demand ornamentation to a greater degree. The most conservative Jewish communities of historical Hungary were also concentrated in Northeastern Hungary, they preserved the original Galician and Bukovinian versions of a great number of ritual objects. Besides the exquisite beauty of their own ornamented objects it is important to note their intensive participation in the distribution and trade of the Christian devotional objects. It can be regarded symbolic that at the end of the chapters presenting the ornamented objects used by the peasants you find the section about children's toys. As complex cultural models the toys intermediate between man and nature, the individual and society. From the bracelets made of dandelions through the dolls made of cob to the decorated sticks used in the tipcat game and given as lovers' presents, toys are mirror images of the adult society and thus reflect the environment, too. 6. As a result of the historical and geographical diversity of BorsodAbaúj-Zemplén, the folk relics of the county are extremely rich and