Tóth Vilmos: Funeral Art - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2006)

The Jewish Cemeteries at the Turn of the 20th Century

Unlike many an Eclectic structure of funeral significance, Lajta's vaults and monuments create a unified effect of tradition, impressiveness and the unique idiom of the artist's own creation. This is illustrated in Salgótarjáni utca Cemetery by the monumental funeral vault of József Bródy's built in 1910, at the same time as the two funeral buildings mentioned above and by Sándor Sváb’s mausoleum raised around 1913. Two of Lajta’s works of more modest proportions were made in 1912—13 for the Herzman and the Mándy tombs, the latter being, rather uncharacteristically for Lajta, almost entirely unadorned. Built next to the ceremonial hall in 1914, the vault holding the Baron Kohner family’s remains is one of Lajta's gate-like sepulchres. His last piece set up in the Salgótarjáni utca Cemetery, the tombstone of Vilmos Bacher decorated with folkloric floral ornamentation, was carved, according to its signature, into stone in 1918, but its designs are likely to have been drawn earlier, in the period that the Kohner vault was made. This is indicated by the fact that the piece most closely related to this one in shape, Ede Mezey’s sepulchre in the Kozma utca Cemetery, was created in 1913. A copy of the Bacher monument was also set up in that cemetery, on the tomb of Henrik Lajta.

■ lléla Lajta: the vault of the Sváb brothen

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