L. Juhász Ilona: A harmincnégyes kőnél… Haláljelek és halálhelyek az utak mentén (Somorja-Komárom, 2013)
12. Földrajzi mutató
At Stone No. 34... Roadside Memorials in Slovakia (Summary) Roadside memorial signs commemorating the victims of car accidents are usually seen by ethnographers as a recent custom. Such mementos have spread widely indeed during the last decades, but they surely have antecedents. It can be considered as a long tradition to mark the location of road accidents, but we do not know much about their exact history. Before the appearing of motor engines on roads, travellers transported by horse carts, sledges etc. also often had fatal accidents, and they were commemorated by various kinds of memorials as well. Several form of such burial signs (crosses or other memorials made of stone) keep alive the remembering of travellers trampled to death by horses, or those fallen under the wheels, as well as the victims of other tragedies, e.g. of murders. We can agree with a German ethnographer, W. Hartinger, who finds the Marterl-type constructions as antecedents of the contemporary road memorials. By the utilization of motor vehicles, accident memorials were set very soon by wealthy people - mostly stone crosses, and often even small chapels. Such an example was erected for the late Queen Astrid of Belgium, about whose memorial at the place of the accident was described also in a Hungarian-language local newspaper in (Czecho)Slovakia, Sajó-vidék (1936), serving such as a pattern for similar memorials. Since the increasing of the road traffic in our days there are countless variants observable: wreath, flowers taped to trees, pillars, rails, fences made of wood, stone, marble, or combination of these. Another German ethnographer, K. Köstlin, described the memorials as a kind of “third sacralisation” of the space for community. Another scholar, ethnographer Chr. Aka, calls the phenomenon as for a kind of “patchwork religion”, i.e. the cult connected with memorials differs from traditional erecting small sacred monuments and their cult. My book offers in the first line description of the memorials: it combines their history and the spread of them. I make distinction between the “memorial sign” in general, and “accident location memorial sign” in particular”. The second is the monument erected at the very place of the accident. The present volume is a result of 20 years long fieldwork in South Slovakia, with comparative and theoretical remarks from Hungary and Europe. It is not an easy task to construct a typology of memorial signs, because they occur rarely in a distinct way. They are usually classified as belonging to several historical periods. The place is usually marked only by flowers or wreath, a candle. Others are made also of wood, stone, marble, metal, or by their combinations. Sometimes they are quasi graves, the memorial sign is encircled, and flowers are planted around it, like at the graves in a cemetery. Several parts of the fatal vehicle {e.g. wheel, tire or tailpipe) may form a part of the memorial. Traffic helmets are
