A Móra Ferenc Múzeum Évkönyve: Studia Ethnographica 3. (Szeged, 2001)

Juhász Antal: Cs. Sebestyén Károly munkássága

The Work of Károly Cs. Sebestyén Károly Cs. Sebestyén (1876-1956) is considered to be an ethnographer, although he worked as a significant scientist in different fields like the history of architecture, cultural history and archaeology. Most of his life he lived in Szeged, where he worked as an art teacher and later in the library of the City Museum. He made several study trips to Central and Western European countries. He applied his scientific experience in ethnographical museology and comparative analysis. His main research topic was folk architecture. He wrote a basic study about the house of the Szeklers, the peasant houses of Krassó-Szörény county in Southern Hungary (today in Romania), as well as about the fireplaces of the houses in the Hungarian Great Plain. His papers on Hungarian folk furniture are also significant. It is due to Károly Cs. Sebestyén that a Gothic church tower (Dömötör tower) from the 12th century was not pulled down in Szeged in the 1920s. He composed the history of the medieval churches in Szeged and he elaborated the history of the fortress of Szeged. He reconstructed the building of the fortress using architectural and military plans from the 17-19

th centuries together with photographic material depicting the demolition of the fortress. It was Sebestyén who found that the boneplates in the graves of the migration period were liner plates of bows. Using ethnological analogies he reconstructed the bow of the conquering Hungarians. (The Hungarian bow and arrow. Szeged, 1933) Károly Cs. Sebestyén was a scientist with thorough grounding and knowledge of scientific literature. He is an outstanding representative of the generation of the ethnographers who worked in the first part of the 20

th century. 58