Cseri Miklós, Füzes Endre (szerk.): Ház és ember, A Szabadtéri Néprajzi Múzeum évkönyve 8. (Szentendre, Szabadtéri Néprajzi Múzeum, 1992)

SZILÁGYI MIKLÓS: 100 év építkezési gyakorlatának változásai egy kisújszállási gazda emlékezetében

CHANGES IN CONSTRUCTION PRACTICE IN THE LAST 100 YEARS AS REMEMBERED BY A FARMER FROM KISÚJSZÁLLÁS The author has been carrying on conversations since 1988 with a peasant farmer of Kisújszállás (Jász-Nagykun-Szolnok County) who was born in 1892. The purpose of these interviews is to record on tape everything this man of exceptional memory can recount. He describes working processes, and narrates events of his life as well as of folk life, characteristic of the last 100 years of the market town where he lives, all in chronological context. The records, so far about 40 hours, offer good opportunity for the analysis of the capacity and special qualities of human memory with the approach and technique of ethnography, stressing methodology, as well as of the facility to recall past events, and the actual significance of the ethnographer acting as catalyst when it comes to the recollection of data of etnographical interest. This time the author publishes edited but otherwise unchanged excerpts of the recollections dealing with the materials, construction techniques, spatial arrangements and functions of the farmhouses and outbuildings in the market town and some detached farmsteads belonging to it. The notes interpret individual observations, experiences of work, and information handed down by persons long dead. All this is compared to the data and general conclusions of other researches into folk architecture in the Great Hungarian Plain. Thanks to the exceptional memory of the person who remembers, we can read detailed descriptions of phenomena in vernacular architecture which were referred to as old-fashioned in the early decades of the 20th century (e.g. the fireplace in a stable for wintering animals at a detached farmstead, the methods of constructing in the room a wattle-framed mud oven or one built of broken roof tiles, the unwritten laws concerning the boundaries of farmsteads, and the adobe wall fencing in the farmstead; drymills and wind mills, the work of brick-making, traditionally done by gipsies, and brick-burning with straw). The peasant, who had lived off of the crop of 25 holds (1 hold = 0.57 hectares) before the collectivization, is able to explain the reasoning and conclusions which lead to the organization of his farm and his way of living. Based on these recollections we can put the information on the changes in the process of construction into the context of economic and social conditions.