Cseri Miklós, Füzes Endre (szerk.): Ház és ember, A Szabadtéri Néprajzi Múzeum évkönyve 10. (Szentendre, Szabadtéri Néprajzi Múzeum, 1995)

HOFFMANN TAMÁS: Néprajzosok az alföldi lakóházakról

lamás Hoffmann ETHNOGRAPHERS ABOUT DWELLING HOUSES OF THE GREAT HUNGARIAN PLAIN János JANKO's opinion, who ventured around 1896 that peasant houses in the Great Hungarian Plain were modelled on High German examples, was flatly rejected in the literature of ethnography. B. SCHIER'a theory of the „house region" (where a type of house is named after the region it is characteristic of) adopted by Zs. BATKY, was also attacked on the grounds that it served to confirm German cultural superiority. The concept of the house region itself was only used in a sense narrower than it had been originally meant. Hungarian ethnographers only applied it to small or sub-regions. At the same time they had no objection to those lucubrations which strove to prove, based on analyses of the formal elements of village houses, a fifteen-century presence of Slavic architectural tradition. K. MOSZYNSKI's and M. GAVAZZI's views found their way to Hungarian literature mainly through the papers of B. GUNLA. In the course of establishing architectural types, the classification of Zs. BATKY was accepted, who treated separately the dwelling houses, characteristic of the Great Hungarian Plain, from the manifestations of the architecture prevailing in the surrounding regions. The small number of archeological data examined was eonscpicious, just like the fact that even archeologists drew parallels only between 9th to 13th century pit dwellings and their East European counterparts. Houses whose walls stood above the ground (and which were devided into two or three rooms normally room, kitchen and pantry after the 14th century) have not been examined for the purpose of comparison. All this can very probably be explained by the contemporary habit of associating the architecture (and almost everything in the traditional environment) of the Great Hungarian Plain with the market town, whose origins, as I. GYÖRFFY supposed to have discovered, went back to the nomadic camp of tents. Agrotechnics, farm management and the appearance of the settlements alike seemed to these research workers the repositories of nomadic traditions. They interpreted the history of culture in Hungary as a traditional chronicle of ethnic Hungarians, and not as a current of fashion, freely flowing across ethnic and language barriers, where phenomena in the villages can be explained by events in the towns. If however, we try to view facts from the latter standpoint the following conclusions will offer themselves: (1) At the beginning of the Middle Ages, some of the peasants lived in pit dwellings in the Great Hungarian Plain. Others had houses above the ground undivided or divided into two rooms. The settlements which later developed into towns consisted fairly probably of similar constructions. Buildings of room-kitchenpantry arrangement, appearing at the end of the Middle Age, spread along the line of the River Danube and the architectural vogue that brought them to the Carpathian Basin had originated in the South-German language territory. Actually the whole trend got mixed with features like the house with a corridor in the middle, coming from Italy through the Alpine regions and other surrounding areas, as the Chech, Moravian and Carpathian Basins, where merchants, craftsmen, then noblemen moving behind the walls of medieaeval towns, had such buildings erected for themselves. In the late Middle Ages houses of this type appeared in versions of more than one storey, and almost all of them contained a living room. Vinegrowers often had oneroom houses with a cellar underneath. (2) The wider acceptance of these developed structures was checked by the large-scale economic and social deterioration in the Hungarian territories during the 16th- 17th centuries. During the decades of Turkish rule many people dispensed even with raising houses of plain vertical walls above the ground and moved, temporarily, into pit dwellings. Even well-to-do families built only two- or three-division houses for themselves (with a cellar under the dwelling room) in the vine-countries lying north of the Great Hungarian Plain (e.g. in the Tokaj region where the increase in wine sales had just raised the inhabitants' level of culture). (3) In the second half of the 18th century three-room houses were augmented with a so-called ,,clean room" (where visitors were received) in many places, first of all in the market towns. An attractive porch, too, was often added to flank the building in imitation of some nobleman's home. (This was considered the be ,,of Hungarian character' by the architects who offered modern houses to villagers in the first half and middle of the 20th century.) In the wake of the agricultural boom in the 19th century dwelling houses with a corridor in the middle reappeared in the Great Hungarian Plain as homes for the well-to-do mainly in market towns. In the „Small Plain" (in the north-western part of Hungary, bordering on the German liguistic area) many a peasant villager, too. lived in such a house. It was at the end of the 19th and in the 20th century that the cotter's house, only fit for living in it (i.e. unsuitable for shop or workshop), originally comprising two rooms, a kitchen, and some small pantries, became widespread all over the country. Architects have considered it an ..alien" feature of the land up to now, and have not been able to find its „Hungárián character". Technical literature aiming at evaluating the phenomenon is teeming with mistakes. Ethnographers refrain from taking sides in print. The building in question, however, was simply home for the urban and rural poor at the twilight of the Middle Ages in England, The Netherlands and Italy, then later in German-speaking Europe from where this trend continued to spread towards the East and the South-East of the continent. Facts warn us that whenever examining the cultural history of dwellings we have to bear in mind that their history is inseparable from the economic processes of the age. There are also social factors to consider as the erection of homes has always been an important aspect of consumer habits. Tracing the ethnic origins of an architectural culture cannot be the principal aim, (with all the others neglected) of a man who undertakes to chronicle its