Balázs György (szerk.): The abolition of serfdom and its impact on rural culture, Guide to the Exhibition Commemorating the 150th Anniversary of the Revolution and War if Independence of 1848-49 (Budapest-Szentendre, Museum of Hungarian Agriculture-Hungarian Open-Air Museum, 1998.)

houses that had no chimneys. The smoke of the oven spread all over the kitchen and left the house through the small windows and the front door. In the late eighteenth century registers of the nobility, mention is already made of „kitchens with chimneys of stone" or „vaulted kitchens". In the houses of relatively prosperous noblemen, there were nice tile stores in the living-rooms („an ordinary tile stove", „a large green stove" or „a small decorated green stove"), the smoke of which puffed out into the kitchen. The furniture of the rooms was scarce and simple. „In the room there were a relatively big table with two long benches, a few chairs, the beds of the head of the family and his children, and a loom. The other members of the household had a chamber with a small window for themselves, where they held all they had and slept even in the chilliest nights," a contemporary wrote about the serfs' houses. In the noblemen's houses, there were also simple carved box-beds and the tables were also similar to those in the serfs' livingrooms. The other pieces of furniture and the utensils were also largely similar. There were families of noble birth who had cupboards (pohárszék) or cabinets (almárium) on the wall in the room. Chairs were sometimes covered with pigskin. In houses with chimneys the rooms were heated by fashionable modern tile stoves. Kitchen utensils and dishes were of a higher standard, and there were beautiful pieces of china and glass. Such high-level objects indicated that their owners stood above their fellow noblemen in the village. They were no longer seen as people leading a peasant's life, even if the house itself had been made of timber, wattle or earth. In the decades after the abolition of serfdom several noble families stayed in the old rut and lived their traditional way of life as members of the lesser nobility. Others managed to break with it and became prosperous farmers by the turn of the century. Those layers of the peasantry that gradually came to be prosperous assumed the bourgeois way of life faster then the others. These people found opportunity to break from the 19