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

Előadások / Presentations - SEBESTYÉN József: Saxon and székely fortofoed churches in Transylvania

researcher Bratulescu, who described the church-fort in detail in 1938, mentioned that the year 1639 is scratched into the plaster on the interior of the north-east tower. Construction of the corner tower can also be dated to between 1605 and 1637. The former balconied spire on the gatehouse tower was built in 1606 after Basta's armies had ravaged the Petki's family seat in Derzs, along with the church, in 1605. The dates 1606 and 1607, referring to this work, were found inscribed on a beam when the tower was being heightened in 1868. In the 18th century, the fortification gradually declined in importance. The castle walls' defensive galleries were demolished in 1788, and the corner towers and the walls were re-roofed or semi-hip roofed levels were added. The row of granary bins can still be seen under the protection of the roof. However, there is another distinct group of Székelyföld monuments mentioned in Latin sources together with the expression „castellum", and also called church-castles. These comprise churches protected by castles with corner towers of the old Italian form. Jolán Balogh, in a work on late Renaissance castle-building, wrote: „Starting in the 1530s, castle building n Hungary progressed on a truly enormous scale, mostly under the direction of Italian architects and military engineers

... The legacy of their work was not just a belt of new, modern forts along the country's border, but the transformation and advance of the Renaissance in the country." The accelerated development of artillery used to besiege castles in the 15th century fundamentally changed the face of castles. The military engineers of the Renaissance developed systems of fortified defence based on sound principles. At first they used the „old Italian" bastions, which were later refined to produce the even more effective new Italian or turreted tower. As far as ground relief permitted, they endeavoured to keep to square or polygonal plan forms. Starting from the corner-bastion arrangement devised by Francesco di Giorgio Martini at the end of the 15th century, we can follow via the drawings of many eminent mid-16th century Italian architects the evolution of designs with regular shapes used as patterns for building Transylvanian Renaissance castles. The regular polygon-shaped arrangement fitting within a circle or ellipse, with corner bastions, was the product of the idealistic architectural approach of the late Renaissance, and in Central and Eastern Europe, where the Turks were continually threatening, it found a ready acceptance and was gradually adapted from the forms of the Italian originators into local versions. This was the fundamental reason why Hungary, divided into three at the end of the Middle Ages, caught in between the Habsburg and Ottoman Turkish Empires, had what was one of the most highly-developed castle defence systems in Europe at the time. In his study published in 1980 on Transylvanian castles with regular ground plans and incorporating the Italian bastion form, Kolozsvár art historian András Kovács wrote, „... circumstances in Italy during the first half of the 16th century led to Old Italian bastions, which had become militarily obsolete, gaining a new function: in the design of noble residences, architects found for them a role which was not so much military as aesthetic, externally dividing enormous closed stretches of masonry, and enabling the construction of elegant interiors..." Without going into a detailed description of the castles built during the time of Transylvanian Princes Gábor Bethlen and György Rákóczi I and II, some of them at least must be mentioned. The Radnóti castle started in 1610, which from the time of György Rákóczi IPs rule was the preferred residence of Transylvanian princes, is associated with the activity of the Verna architect Giacomo Resti, as are the Alvinc castle, the Mikó castle in Csíkszereda and the Lázár castle in Gyergyószárhegy. The entire construction of the Radnóti castle is attributed to the most important Italian architect active in Transylvania during the rule of György Rákóczi II, Agostino Serena. The church-castles discussed next also date from the time of Gábor Bethlen and György Rákóczi I and II. Although we have no information on who their architects were, their ground plan arrangement strongly betrays the influence of the Italian military engineers invited to build princely castles in Transylvania, and we mrt seek their builders among those who worked under Giacomo Resti and Agostino Serena. One of the standard works on the subject, Jolán Balogh's Varadinum...relate