Agria 43. (Az Egri Múzeum Évkönyve - Annales Musei Agriensis, 2007)
Zentai Tünde: Az ormánsági templomfestő
Tünde Zentai The Ormánság Church Painter This study presents the career of Ormánság carpenter and church painter János Gyarmati with the help of archive and literary material and first-hand site analyses. The findings form an integral part of the Southern Transdanubian Painted Churches Research Project. The author has located forty-two churches with floral decorated wooden ceilings, galleries, pews and pulpits in southwestern Hungary, most of them in Calvinist churches dating from the 18 th and 19 th centuries. Of these about a dozen can be found in the Ormánság, an ethnographically distinct region covering forty-three villages on the banks of the Dráva. The wooden features in four of the churches in question survive in their entirety (Adorjás, Kórós, Kovácshida, Drávaiványi). Numerous others, unfortunately, have either been repainted or partially lost, while some lost examples are known only in the written records which survive them. János Gyarmati's name first came to the public's attention during the 1950s in a presbyteral record book, which noted that he made the gallery for the church in Kémes in 1826. His name has appeared regularly in the relavant literature since 1961, where his connection with Kémes has led people to attribute the carpentry work at the churches in Kórós and Kovácshida to János Gyarmati on stylistic grounds. The details of his life and work remained unknown, and to make things worse the document originally attesting to his existence went missing. From the findings in this article, however, we now know that there were in fact two carpenters by the name of János Gyarmati, who were father and son. The elder Gyarmati was born in about 1750, and was the son of the Calvinist minister in Visio. According to a detailed Latin text written in 1785, the Széchényi Descripto, we know that the elder Gyarmati taught carpentry in Siklós, together with two other carpenters whose signatures can be found in painted churches in southern Transdanubia. We consequently discover also that Siklós was at the time a carpentry centre. In 1791 János Gyarmati moved to Vajszló in the Ormánság, an area which was then without a carpenter, and it was then that he built a painted church there. His son followed in his father's footsteps on the death of the elder Gyarmati aged 72 in 1832, and it was probably the younger Gyarmati who was mentioned in the Kémes document, which came to light again in 2006. The 1830s, which saw the ending of the painted church as a building type, saw a final flourishing of the floral style, thanks to an interest in Renaissance traditions. Whether the work carried out at the churches in Kórós and Kovácshidain 1834 and 1835, was in fact the work of the younger Gyarmati can only ever be proved with the supply of fresh evidence and the restoration of the repainted gallery at Kémes. 247
