Tamási Judit szerk.: Oszlopokat emeltünk, hogy beszéljék a múltat, A millenniumi műemlékhelyreállítások lexikona (Budapest, 2000)

COLUMNS HAVE BEEN RAISED TO TALK ABOUT THE PAST AN ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF THE RESTORATION OF HISTORIC BUILDINGS IN THE YEAR OF THE MILLENNIUM We release this volume in the hope that with its help Hungarian society, celebrating the Millennium, will be given a picture of what kinds of investments aiming at preserving our cultural heritage does the responsible cultural management support. Our publication strives to demonstrate all the government programs having relation to the field, and also to present all the almost seven hundred buildings dealt with by these programs, together with demonstrating the process of restoration - in an encyclopaedic way, with reliable professionalism, in a form understandable for everyone, so that on the eve of the new millennium we can show our values to the nation and the world in their splendour and so that we can devote to the future the capital inherited from the past. This being the beginning of the millennial period, the aim of this volume is to emphasise the number of sites on which there is work in progress, regardless of the fact whether the projects will have been concluded by the 20

,h of August in 2001, or not. It wishes to record, and be the record of a process at this given section of time. The front cover, showing the Millennial Memorial on Heroes' Square, and the fact that the volume is to be published on the 104

lh anniversary of the 1896 Act "On works of art to commemorate the 1000 year anniversary of the founding of the Hungarian state" is meant to be a reference to the millennial year of 1896. In this volume, the reader will find an introduction both by the Minister of Culture and the President of the Hungarian Office for the Preservation of Historic Monuments, followed by a summary of those eleven projects in the field of the built heritage which were launched by the cultural administration in the frame of the Hungarian Millennium. Subsequently, some of the most interesting buildings in each group are described in some detail. The third part is an A-Z guide to the towns participating in the program. The approximately seven hundred entries provide a complete overview of all the millennial restorations. O Restoration of Royal Seats The beginnings of the restoration programme for royal seats date back to the years before the 1996 millecentenary. In that time the mayors of the one-time royal seats Esztergom, Székesfehérvár, Veszprém, Visegrád, Buda and Óbuda proposed that these towns should be the key locations of the millecentenary. Accepting the programme had the benefit that a further planning, now aiming at completeness, of the individual locations was begun and continued and also the Hungarian National Board for the Protection of Historic Monuments provided from its own budget greater sums than earlier to the so far modestly proceeding works in Esztergom and Visegrád. Upon accepting the restoration plans the aim of the complex restoration of the inner castle in Esztergom, the birthplace of St Stephen was set. In the case of the Visegrád castle it seems that the lasting protection of the restored ruins of the beautiful palace from King Matthias' time, built on the site of the royal seat of the Anjou period, can be solved with covering part of the area. In Székesfehérvár the lasting preservation of the coronation and burial places of Hungarian monarchs requires an awning to be built over the ruins. Similarly: in Veszprém, in the case of the Gizella Chapel (the one-time two-storey chapel of the royal living quarters), also an awning is desirable to be constructed, as in the past few decades the roof of the chapel was leaking several times, and the wall-paintings from the second half of the 13

th century are on the verge of complete deterioration. In Pécs, one of our first Bishop's seats, the restoration of the university founded by (Anjou) Louis I, uncovered beside the cathedral, and the adjacent Golden Mary Chapel, together with the Lapidary, and finishing these works were also included in the target programmes. We also have to be aware that it is not only the resources being limited but also the great amount of work requiring special care that has to be carried out which make it impossible to finish the royal seats programme by 2001. Except for Pécs and Mohács-Sátorhely in all other locations further efforts of both the government and the monument preservation experts what is needed in order that we can bequeath our royal seats to posterity in a really worthy condition. O Small Churches and Ruin-churches from the Arpadian Age (897-1031) in Villages It was not by chance that the choice of the subject of the programme targeted this group of historic monuments, which belong to a very special and most valuable group of the historic monuments stock in Hungary, all the more so as in most of the cases there is no community to maintain these small churches and ruin-churches, or even if there is one, it has very little financial means to be devoted to saving, maintaining these valuable, but generally neglected