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

The Jewish Cemeteries at the Turn of the 20th Century

recognisably present on his parents' sepulchre unveiled in 1903, Lajta's first funeral work to be realised.

Lajta's other mural sepulchres, such as the tombs of the Schwarcz or the Greiner families (both built around 1907), have a more robust effect while being dominated by angular forms and classical columns rather than vaults. They are as richly ornamented as Zsigmond Deutsch's roughly contemporary but somewhat smaller mural vault or the Klein tomb made in 1913. Lajta's unique ornaments include religious, folkloric and geometric elements alike. Another characteristic of his works is that the Hebrew and Hungarian inscriptions on the tombstones have a decorative function, too, if the epitaph is not in fact the only decorative element of the sepulchre; for that reason Lajta designed letter types fitting the style of his works.

Of his works in the Kozma utca Cemetery, mention must be made of the special Epstein tomb from around 1903, or the two tombs, reminiscent of the forms associated with traditional Protestant headstones, designed for the

■ Béla Lajta: the sepulchre oh Vilmoó Bacher

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