Műemlékállományunk bővülése, új műemlékfajták (Az Egri Nyári Egyetem előadásai 1987 Eger, 1987)

Nováki Gyula: Őskori és középkori földvárak Magyarországon

conference on the preservation of historic monuments was held, and, where it was recognized that ensembles deserved preservation. This decesion was reflected in the resulting Charter of Athens. In the past fifty years, this view has become generally accepted and increasingly influential, developing into a main pricnciple of XXth century conservation. I should stress here that we are speaking of two different but related questions. On the one hand, the value of buildings as ensembles has been recognized, and on the other hand, the value of simpler buildings has been reconsidered. "These groups of buildings must be treated with particular care to ensure their unity, maintenance and restoration. In these cases, restoration and conservation should follow the guidelines mentioned above." This is what the Charter of Venice has to say on historic ensembles. This realization has lead to the development of a whole new branch of conservation in countries developed from this point of view. It has at the same time become clear that if groups of buildings become regarded as worthy of üsting and preservation, then conservation loses some of its independence from town development and planning. I don't believe that the profession has suffered in any way from this change. Monuments were seen in the past as being entities separate from their urban environment, ruled by different criteia. if however, the fate of both town and monument are seen to be parallel, then urban planning policies must bear monuments in mind. As a result of these developments, the rehabilitation of our historic town was started after World War II. It is an indication of the novelty of this approach that the Charter of Venice gave detailed instructions on conservation and restoration methods, and finished with the passage I quoted earlier on in my paper. Another twenty years were needed for the Charter on Historic Towns to be formulated and presented to the ICOMOS congress. We see in the very title of the charter, a further shift of emphasis towards ever larger units. Conservationists are then not only to deal with individual ensembles, but the townscape as a whole, historic town centres and even whole towns. After many years of mistakes, it became patently clear that individual monuments are degraded if the surrounding environment is altered in an unsympathetic manner. The same applies to historic ensembles and town centres. Veszprém and Debrecen are prime examples of how characterless and unsympathetic redevelopment around the historic core can lead to serious damage, even if the centre itself suffers little damage. This view has not yet been universally accepted. There are opponenents to this new view at home and abroad. I am sure thought that this is the logical conclusion of Dvorak's views. The enlargement of the notion of the historic monument and greater public involvement in decisionmaking has lead to a rapid increase in the number of listed monuments. Dezső Dercsényi in his small book entitled Conservation in Hungary Today tells us that the number of officially listed monuments at the turn of the century amounted to less than 50. Compare that to today's virtual 10 000. We now realize, of course, that even more buildings deserve protection, but he tells us how difficult it was in the 50's to get the original list of 12,000 accepted and how it was whittled down in the 1960's by 30%. We should not therefore be surprised if a large number of buildings which according to Pogányi's interpretation are worthy of preservation have not received attention so far. Many buildings have been lost, but nevertheless, an increasing number of buildings are being reconsidered: a direct result of growing public participation and the passing of time. I would say that probably about 30,000 buildings deserve to be preserved and they constitute our architectural heritage. The term "architectural heritage" has become general world-wide. This expresses the idea that that the number of buildings and groups of buildings deserving preservation is far higher than the number of listed buildings. Here we see a new search for identity. If a person is determined to some buildings that hold a particular significance for the community in which he lives, he will be little interested in the views of experts and government ministers on whether the buildings deserve listing or not. He is interested in the emotional value of these buildings to himself and the other members of the community. They represent for him his home, perhaps birthplace, his "genius loci". This is no passive approach. People are prepared to fight if necessary to preserve their own personal heritage. This was the case in Tampere, a few years ago, when a scheme that would have involved major demolition in the Pispala district of the town was blocked by the local population. The first example of protest of this kind in Hungary was at Mezőtúr when a building scheduled for demolition was retained after local protest. At Székesfehérvár, 5 local companies got together to preserve a group of unprotected buildings adjacent to the Serb Orthodox Church. There has also recently been a demonstration in Leningrad against the demolition of the Inglaterra Hotel. I should like to live to see an expansion of the notion of the historic monument to such an extent that the protection of architectural values should become self-evident. With the widening of the notion of the historic monument and greater public involvement in the process of preservation, several new types of monument have emerged. The first new category covered vernacular architecture, and work started in the forties and the fifties, although serious work only began in Hungary in the sixties, when the first buildings were restored and preserved at Nagyvázsony. This is now very much part of mainstream conservation in Hungary, and the quality of work carried out in the field exemplary. Few countries have concentrated to such a great extent on in site preservation and whole villages have been protected in this manner. This doesn't mean that our losses are only minimal; far from it. At the same time, this type of architecture is appreciated to a significantly greater extent by town dwellers than country people. I shall now only briefly mention the other new types of monument. We find tremendous interest nowadays in industrial monuments and particulary in railway architecture. Here, researchers are not only dealing with architecture but technology and the related factory equipment. The situation with agricultural monuments is similar—here, we are not talking about tiny peasant farms but major estates and their systems of production. Since technological development in agriculture lags well behind that in industry, a large proportion of these monuments are still in use. Housing