Cseri Miklós, Tárnoki Judit szerk.: Népi építészet a Kárpát-medencében a honfoglalástól a 18. századig - A 2001. október 9-10-én Szolnokon megrendezett konferencia anyaga (Szentendre; Szolnok: Szabadtéri Néprajzi Múzeum; Szolnoki Damjanich János, 2001)
BALASSA M. Iván: A népi építészet a régészet és a néprajztudomány között
Vernacular architecture between archaeology and ethnography IVÁN BALASSA M. The latest period, of which archaeological research can uncover finds in the field of vernacular architecture is the 16 th century. Our archaeologists rarely find relics from the 17 th century and anything discovered from the 1700s is rather an error. Ethnographers and architecture historians in the 2 nd half or at the end of the 20 th century hardly found such farmer houses or village buildings, which could be dated from the 17 th century. Relics from the next century are also not more frequent. There is a gap of 100-150 years between the two groups of sources. Why didn't remain in our villages two- three hundred years old buildings? The troubled history of the Carpathian basin - since permanent wars stopped only in the first third of the 18 th century followed by some peaceful years - does not explain everything. It seems that the spread of implementation of new techniques and materials, a change in the field of construction technology, the use of sun-dried adobe bricks improved by vegetal additions contributed to the disappearance of - often "morally" considered as old-fashioned - buildings. The oldest building we know today stands in Transylvania, in the former mining town of Torockó, built in 1668 in the part of the town where mineworkers used to live. The other one is a few years younger: it is a manor built in 1678 and stands today in the Open Air Museum of Kolozsvár (today Cluj, Romania). Both houses have log-walls and both originate from an area where the changes in the building material took place extraordinarily late. In the region, where the latter was built, in Kászon, the mentioned changes started not before the 20 th century. We have much less luck in other regions in Hungary. The changes affected the central regions as well as the northern and western border areas of Hungary. Therefore, no farmer buildings from the 17 th or 18 th century remained here. Only archive sources provide us with reliably information from these centuries. There would be another group of sources, the depictions, which are more frequent from this period onwards. Depictions of castles, prints presenting battles also represent houses and settlements. These are often used to illustrate village conditions in the 16 th ~17 th century. However, we have to be very careful. As a good example, we mention the famous prints of Houfnagel published in 1617, on which the town buildings of Drégelypalánk, Pozsony, Kassa, Nagyvárad, Kolozsvár and Tata are very similar and the resemblance is striking to the house depictions in Germany and in the Netherlands in the same period. This is one more reason why it would be very important if the archaeology would approach its last period of discoveries to our age. It also would be important, if the ethnography and the architecture history could find as much as possible authentic buildings from the 17 th or to be more realistic, from the 18 th century. Only this results would provide us with a safe ground to the authentic and reliable interpretation of the written and iconographie sources of this period.
