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

Előadások / Presentations - MEZŐS Tamás: What in german is known as „Bodendenkmalschutz”

officials of making radical changes in ruins which fit harmoniously into the landscape. Marcell Jankovics, however, in a March issue of Magyar Nemzet, regarded everything that has happened to the ruined church since Möller (sic) as being in the „postmodern spirit", most recently under the plans of János Sedlmayer, and considers the changes to be insufficient. He is in favour of the purist restoration of the ruin. The other question is: how can the ..restoration" - in practice reconstruction - of the old city of Warsaw and of many other buildings seriously damaged in the Second World War be reconciled with the principles of conserving ruins as monuments. I am convinced that this is a completely different question, and different again from that of how ruins should be displayed to the public. What sets the problem apart is that the destruction of the centre of Warsaw and the royal palace was a consequence of an attempt to destroy the Polish people, as a tragic epilogue to the Warsaw Uprising. As things turned out, it was not the nation which perished, but the destroyer which was destroyed. Amends were made in the revival of the national past after the war, which in this context can be seen as a political decision, just as in the example of Cologne or in another, not mentioned so far, of Speyer Cathedral. The reconstruction of the bombed-out Goethe House in Frankfurt at the beginning of the 1950s also had a political aspect. It was an undisputediy important relic of the national culture, although not for architectural reasons: it was the poet's birthplace, and had been set up as a museum in the previous century. However, it had been the local headquarters of the National Socialist Party from the early 1930s. After the Second World War, the German conscience, while recognising the building's cultural significance, worried about rebuilding an object so closely linked to the tragedy of the recent past. It took nearly 10 years to make the decision, and now the Goethe House can be visited on the bank of the Main in its original form. The decision, and this is the important point for us, was taken at a political level and not by the relevant monument conservation authority. The mined monuments to be discussed here have perhaps not generated such fundamental problems of architecture and urban landscape as the above examples. They have nonetheless been the subjects of numerous conferences on theoretical and applied issues, and are all monuments which have emerged from underground by means of archaeological excavations, monuments which have been hidden from view from those living around them for centuries, perhaps even millennia. Covered up by the activities of ordinary life, they were in many cases fortunate to have been saved from complete destruction and obscurity by references to them in written sources. I do not look on the presentation of ruins as a primarily technical issue, and it is not the architectural means of conveying and displaying the original building which are my main concern here. Neither do I intend to launch into the debate by doggedly upholding the prescriptions of the Charter or by insisting on an orthodox approach. The nature of the problem today was brought home to me by a job I was working on. One day, I had been attending a meeting on the presentation of a ruin which had been under discussion for many long months. The monument had come to light following the demolition of three houses on one of the shorter sides of Fő tér (Main Square) in Szombathely. As usual in these circumstances, the remains were too deep to integrate presentation of them into the surroundings. On the other hand they were higher than what would be desirable, since it was impossible to show the building remains to visitors a whole storey below. There was a limited area available for presentation. The primary boundaries were set by the surrounding buildings and utilities, but the function of the proposed new building confined the area available to some parts of the basement, restricted to a minimum floor area because of the bank's safe and filing room on the ground floor. In their expert opinion given on the basis of their visit following completion of excavations, the Excavation Committee found presentation of the ruins to be absolutely essential The excavation of the Amber Road in the present urban fabric of Savaria could offer a unique treasure for visitors. But is this spectacle