A Móra Ferenc Múzeum Évkönyve: Studia Ethnographica 6. (Szeged, 2008)

Hanneleena Hieta: Ethnographer s and three realities - how agency and institutional tradition intertwine in the museum setting

museum. At the end of the day, a replica of the original was built in the park. This procedure was not alien to Hungarian museum practice of the time.

34 To reach as high a scientific standard as possible the ethnographers made inventories of three different onion-farmers' houses. This was in line with the historical inventories that were a common branch of research in Hungarian ethnography at the time. The house which was selected was recreated on the site based on minute detail from the original house. Local craftsmen built the house using old second-hand and partly new building materials. The inventories were utilized for the interior furnishing of the house. The ethnographers tried to imitate the lifestyle of an imaginary family occupying the house and positioned the objects in places that would seem natural for their use. Some of the usages on display were not common to all the households, but the ethnographers decided to show them to the public anyway, as in their view they were great examples of peasant inventiveness. 5 There are two more houses in the peasant small-town complex that I would like to discuss in this context: the fisherman's house from Csongrád and the pepperfarmer's house from Szeged. The Csongrád fishermen and wheelers were a very different, more stagnant, social group in comparison to the onion-farmers. In the 1960s, before the great modernizing changes, there were a remarkable number of old fishermen's houses in the town center. A cluster of 17 houses had been protected as historical-architectural monuments and, therefore, the exemplary house for the museum had to be found elsewhere in town. The house that was selected had some evidence of a previous archaic vaulted kitchen (boltíves konyha), and based on this evidence and an inventory of another building outside Csongrád, a vaulted kitchen was restored as part of the building when it was re-erected in the park. Similarly, since ethnographers knew that the fishermen's houses had three rooms, a later roomdivision was eliminated and the exemplary house, which by the time of its discovery had four rooms, was turned into a three-roomer.

3 The pepper-farmer's house is the last one which Dr. Juhász selected, and it was not completed until the beginning of the 1990s. He had in fact already in the 1960s documented several of the so-called sunray decorated townhouses in the Lower Town of Szeged. When he returned in the 1980s for the selection of a house, the one he had thought most suitable had already been demolished. Nonetheless, this particular house was re-created in the park based on Juhász's own documentation and the 1883 blueprint of the very house which was found in the city archives.

37 In other words, the Szeged pepper-farmer's house and the Makó onion.farmer'

s house are replicas; the Szeged tanya is a compilation of original buildings from disparate origins. The Csongrád fisherman's house is an original building reconstructed into an earlier phase and the Szentes tanya is in its original form. All TYKL spa/148/u:8 Felföldi 2000, passim. Juhász 1988, 186- 187; TYKL spa/148/u:8 TYKL spa/148/u:8