Vezető a Déri Múzeum kiállításaihoz II. A Déri gyűjtemények. 2. javított kiadás (Debrecen, 2001)

THE CRAFT OF TIN AND 132 BRONZE CASTING AND THE GOLDSMITH'S CRAFT Bells were indispensable appendages of the church buildings. In Hungary, they went in general use in nth century. The earliest specimen found was probably cast around 1200. From the next few centuries, we only have just a small number of bells preserved. It can be assumed that, at the beginning of the 16th century, there were bells even in the church buildings of the smallest and least significant villages. However, the appearance of the Turks and the subsequent continuous warfare resulted in the decline of bell-casting, and the number of existing bells was also quickly decreasing. After the Turks were expelled at the end of the 17th century, and also in the 18th century, bell casters appeared in almost all of the important settlements of the country. Apart from the pieces made by professional artisans, there also remained a few inferior quality bells from this period, which were made by bunglers. In the northern and southern parts of the country, the bell-casters made bells in their own shops, while in the eastern part, there were more itinerant masters, who made bells at the locations where they received the orders from. At the end of the 19th century, after a blooming of the trade in the 18th and 19th centuries, bellcasting as an industry is discontinued. Among the bells in the present exhibition, the earliest example is a small one deriving from 1604, on which the decorations are finely wrought numbers and letters. On the bell from 1668, beside the Latin inscription, there is a relief demonstrating the enrichment of embellishment on bells in the Baroque Age. Next to the bells, a large mortar dating from 1670 is displayed. It is decorated with the coat-of-arms of the Haller and Bethlen families, and it was used for producing gunpowder.