Cseri Miklós, Füzes Endre (szerk.): Ház és ember, A Szabadtéri Néprajzi Múzeum évkönyve 6. (Szentendre, Szabadtéri Néprajzi Múzeum, 1990)

ZENTAI TÜNDE: A lakóház tüzelőberendezésének és füstelvezetésének alakulása a Dél-Dunántúlon

Tünde Zentai THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE HEARTH IN SOUTHERN TRANSDANUBIA We have followed the history of heating devices in Southern Transdabubia from the times when the ancestors of present day Hungarians entered the Carpathian Basin. From sporadic archeological finds we can see that under the Arpads (879-1301) both the type of house with an open fireplace (and a separate oven outside) and the one with oven occurred. Remains of the former can be found in Zalavár, Zalaszabar, Fonyód-Bélatelep, Pécs and Eté. Fire was made on the ground either in a corner or in the middle of the house. In earlier times often the place of the fire was not permanent. What makes us think so is that in the floor of several houses patches, burnt through, occur in several places, and certain references in the archival sources concerning St. Margit (Princess Margaret, daughter of King Béla IV of Hungary) also seem to point to this direction. Most of the homes sunk into the ground have an oven in the corner opposite the entrance. There are ovens of the earlier type, constructed of stones and mud (in Kereki and Vörs /Somogy county/; Malom and Túrony /Baranya county/), and a larger number of hewn ovens. Both types were also known in the period of the Great Migration. Hewn ovens lasted longer and were used over a wide area. In the Arpadian age dwelling houses had practically no device for smoke removal, this is why there were so many ovens in the open. We know very little of the centuries that followed. Beside the rise of the houses to ground level the most significant development was the creation of smokeless dwelling places which is associated with the appearance of stoves. In the southern part of Transdanubia stoves occur in the homes of those placed high in the social hierarchy as early as in the 14th century. Concave and also flat tiles, the so-called „eyes" of the stove, however only appear in larger numbers and in a rich variety of forms from the 15th—16th centuries onward. We have no documents of their use in peasant houses. The first find of a stove in comparatively good condition was come across is the remains of a chimneyless house in Ete and dates back to the end of the 16th century. The process of the room with a stove stoked from outside becoming general can, for archives. The documents that concern peasant dwellings however give little insight into them before the 18th century. Data relating to this century still reflect change. The universal use of stoves was, at least in the western regions, not yet an accomplished fact. This is borne out by early ethnographic collections that recorded oral traditions. The backwardness of some areas in Zala and Somogy counties is demonstrated by the erection of a chimneyless house as late as the 19th century. Still it can be gathered from archival documents and ethnographic collections that in the larger, western half of Southern Transdanubia chimneyless houses were augmented with a room heated by a stove and, among the poor somewhat later, with a rick-shaped oven stoked from outside respectively. At the same time, on the fringes of the territory where the houses characteristic of the Great Hungarian Plain prevailed, the so-called dori stove („dóri kályha", a kind of imitation stove made of adobe or brick and whitewashed) was used. In the strip along the river Danube developments kept abreast with that of the Great Plain type houses and were cetainly ahead of neighbouring western areas from where, with the exception of Sárköz, we scarcely have any evidence of the existence of stoves, from the 18th century onwards. On the basis of researches conducted up to now we can say that in the 18th century a typical peasant house in the southern part of Transdanubia consisted of a room, free of smoke, a chimneyless („smoky") kitchen and sometimes a pantry. We should not forget however that houses develop in stages measured by centuries, and thinking of houses in a period, forms of the former should also be taken into account. It is imaginable that future excavations of late-middleage settlements will account for the large quantities of simple stove tiles and will confirm theories of the earlier use of stoves in peasant houses. The 18th century is also an age of widening use of chimneys. Open chimneys began to spread first in the eastern part of the region, mainly in a wide strip along the river Danube. Our earliest data relate to Tolna county at the beginning of the 18th century, but in the 1780s chimneys found their way into the serfs' houses in the Drávaszög and Eastern Ormánság, too. In the plans made for the houses of settlers in the villages of the estate of the Treasury there are houses with vaulted chimney brace and flue and ones with timber chimney in the years from 1750 to 1790. The former usually came together with a new type of kitchen. The process shows especially well where traditional houses were made of wattle. In Mohács, for example, in 1774, in houses of wattle-walled room and pantry the kitchen walls and chimney were constructed of adobe. Regular, prismshaped ovens, built of adobe or of bricks spread together with this „modern" types of kitchen. A connection can be experienced between the method of smoke removal and the material of the walls. The area of houses with chimney in Southern Transdanubia roughly coincides with that of solid (earth, adobe or brick) walls. During the 19th century houses with chimney became dominant in the eastern part of the region. By then the heating system of dwelling houses had become, especially along the river Danube, mostly the same as the ones used in the type of houses named after the Great Hungarian Plain. In the rooms rickshaped ovens, typical of the