A műemlékek sokszínűsége (A 28. Egri Nyári Egyetem előadásai 1998 Eger, 1998)

Előadások / Presentations - SZILASSY Zoltán: Cultural landscapes: a borderline discipline betwen monument protection and nature protection

as a new category in the World Heritage Convention. These landscapes include: „??". The above definition amounts, of course, to a narrowing of the scope of cultural landscapes, but formulating the criteria, even for a limited scope of landscapes, has been a very complex and still unclear job for specialists. The first meeting of specialists aimed at defining the categories of characteristic landscapes of universal significance and worthy of preservation for humankind was held in France in 1992. The categories of cultural landscapes worded there were adopted for application by the UNESCO World Heritage Committee, thus allowing landscapes to be more evenly represented on the World Heritage List. The various types of cultural landscapes were discussed at the conferences held in Germany in 1993, in Canada in 1994, in the Philippines and Australia in 1995 and in Austria in 1996. The exchanges of views at these meetings are of great help in surveying, classifying and assessing cultural landscapes, and have been contributing a lot to the ever growing world-wide awareness of the selection and preservation of cultural landscapes. These landscapes usually have a complex structure, most of them are fine mosaics, made up of distinct areas with different types of soil structure, used accordingly for different purposes, including farming, forestry and pasturing. Slopes are very often terraced, mainly to avoid landslides, requiring regular maintenance. They illustrate the need of cultural landscapes for permanent human care and, consequently, their fragility and their return, if human intervention is stopped or reduced, to their natural conditions, in other words, when these areas are left redundant, the structure of the landscape changes, transforms. Cultural landscapes are often richer in species and biologically more diverse than natural ones. In spite of that, one has to be careful in assessing the natural value of a landscape, because in some regions (like the Mediterranean) the reduction of biodiversity took place several thousand years ago, as a result of human intervention, and no new species have appeared to fill the deserted areas (niches). A few regions around the earth (like the Mediterranean) may be considered cultural landscapes in their integrity, where the long-term interaction of the population and its natural environment have produced irreversible changes both in biological and ecological diversity. Cultural landscapes often reflect special techniques of sustainable land use, in accordance with the specific features and limits of the natural environment in which they evolved, as well as their specific, spiritual interrelationship with nature. Protection for cultural landscapes therefore may contribute to modern techniques of sustainable land use and may preserve or even improve the natural values of landscapes. CLASSIFICATION OF CULTURAL LANDSCAPES There are significant differences between the structures of natural landscapes on the one hand and cultural landscapes on the other. Cultural landscapes often have a more uneven, or else, a more homogeneous structure than natural landscapes, with the middle range often missing, but there is no general rule. Cultural landscapes contain more linear components (e.g. hedgerows) and larger bare areas than original landscapes (but in some cases the situation is just the opposite). The world presumably has an infinite variety of cultural landscapes, but each type is strictly structured according to local traditions and sustainable activities. Cultural landscapes are the result of „the joint activities of man and nature". They illustrate the evolution of human society and settlement, reflect the effects of physical restrictions and opportunities as imposed upon them by the natural environment, as well as the influence of both external and internal continuous social, economic and cultural forces. Our cultural landscapes are generally the product of an organic development, the interaction between man and environment. As to the time and duration of the interaction, cultural landscapes may be modern or historic, continuous or fossil ones. Some cultural landscapes reflect a thousand