A Balaton-felvidék népi építészete. A Balatonfüreden, 1997. május 21-23-án megrendezett konferencia anyaga (Szentendre-Veszprém, 1997)

Hudi József: Kisnemesi társadalom és építészet a Bakonyban és a Balaton-felvidéken

Society and architecture of the lower nobility in the Bakony-Region and the Balaton-Uplands JÓZSEF HUDI The author, historian of Hungarian social history of the 18th-19th centuries is one of the researchers of aristocratic society in Transdanubia. In his lecture he examines the nobility living in the regions of Bakony and Balaton Uplands before the year 1848 considering two aspects. First, he tries to find an answer to the question in which social structure did the nobility of the region live. He proves that the lower nobility of the two bordering regions lived in a structured society. The rich noble class of big landowners (owning 200-1000 acres of land) constituted the political elite of the county while the living standard of the lower nobility with or without property - at a lower stage of the social hierarchy - was similar to the farmers' way of life. We see here a specialty of the structure of settlement, which can be traced back to the middle ages: the majority of the local nobility used to live in noblemen's villages beside farmer villages. There are in the 18th-19th centuries more than 120 villages in the two counties (Veszprém and Zala) of the examined region with the legal position of nobility. When farmers settled down in them in the course of the 19th century, the nobility, although became a minority, still kept the power. This lowest and further divisible layer of lower nobility is hard to be separated from the farmers: wellto-do farmers often married noble ladies and as a consequence, their property gained tax exemption and they reached a more free social position. Through the interaction of farmers' culture and the culture of poorer nobility, a special cultural tradition took shape, which had an influence on the architecture of the villages. The second part of the lecture presents the sources in archives, which help the research of the architecture of the lower nobility living at farmers' level. The social hierarchy is reflected in the architectural environment as well. The high aristocracy erected multistory castles with parks and lakes, the middle nobility, imitating the rich, built single-story manor houses with many rooms and the lower nobility settled down in similar houses like the farmers (with three-division structure: room-kitchen-pantry), their quality however met a higher demand in the 18th-19th centuries and the houses were modernized and provided with more amenities in the second half of the 19th century. The merging of historic layers remind us that the latest ethnographic collection has to be completed with research in the archives which will allow the reconstruction of the change of human architectural environment. 192