Marcu-Istrate, Daniela - Rusu, Adrian Andrei - Szőcs Péter Levente (szerk.): Arhitectura religioasă medievală din Transilvania 3. (Satu Mare, 2004)

Alexandru Baboş: Invisible features in the Design of the Timber Curches of Maamureş

unit in this system was the royal fathom. Notably, the large Hungarian royal fathom, with its decimal division into 10 feet, was a quite rare example in Europe, where most of the various fathoms took the ancient Greek model of 6 feet. The royal fathom had two basic divisions, the royal hand and the royal foot, which, curiously enough, could hardly be conversed from one-another. On one side, from the royal foot were obtained the royal ell and royal yard by duplicating and respectively triplicating it, while on the other side, the smaller royal hand was the ideal standard of the system.

Despite its clear structure, the royal system raises serious obstacles when the sizes of its units must be determined. Bogdán established the size of the royal fathom to 312,6 cm, after the standard published in 1702," avoiding deliberately to consider the standards given already by the mentioned, problematic Tripartitum. Inside of this important customary law-collection, the royal fathom was illustrated as 16 times a line representing the size of a royal hand. The problem is that each edition of the collection, presented a different hand-size, and therefore the royal fathom, varied a lot too. If the sizes of the royal hand are considered, provided by Bogdán,11 12 13 a royal fathom is 304 cm, according to the edition from 1517, 299,2 cm in 1561, 288 cm in 1565 and 1762, 300,8 cm in 1571, 297,6 cm in 1572, 289,6 cm in 1830 and 305,6 cm in 1894. Calculating with the dimensions of 18,43 cm, 18,62 cm, 18,996 cm and 19,1 cm established by others for the standard hand, the royal fathoms of 294,88 cm, 297,92 cm, 303,936 cm and 305,6 cm is obtained.12 In conclusion, there are at least 11 different known standards for the royal fathom and its divisions.14

In order to determine which of these various standards was used most probably by the master carpenters of Maramureş, the three oldest known standards of the Tripartitum (from year 1517, 1561 and 1565) was chosen, and the one from 1702, selected by Bogdán (fig. 1). In fact, these four standard royal hands, spanning between 18 and 19,54 cm, encompass all the other known examples. The differences between the standards may seem small at first sight, but, when the church-width of 720 cm from Sârbi Josani is considered, the result will range from 25 feet with the standard from 1565, to 24 feet for the standard from 1561 and only 23 feet with the standard preferred by Bogdán (fig. 2). The length of 1039 cm of the same church gives a reliable

The Timber Churches of Maramureş

11 Bogdán I., Magyarországi hossz- és földmértékek a XVL század végéig, Budapest 1978, 96.

12 Ibidem, 69.

13 Ibidem, 67.

14 It would be interesting to know how the users of the standards reacted to the repeated changes from one edition to another, and if these variations led to a parallel circulation of different standards, eroding the very essence of the royal system that was to unity the kingdom. This could have been a reality especially after the partition of the kingdom following the Turkish occupation.

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