Majorossy Judit: Egy történelmi gyilkosság margójára. Merániai Gertrúd emlékezete, 1213 - 2013. Tanulmánykötet - A Ferenczy Múzeum kiadványai, A. sorozat: Monográfiák 2. (Szentendre, 2014)
VI. English Summaries
To the Margin of a Historical Murder - English Summaries after the burial an ornamented sepulchre was built with the contribution of certain French masters. This - otherwise logical - opinion, however, could not explain the posterior burials in the chamber under the sepulchre untouched until the Turkish occupation. Dating the graves identified in the church crossing to the Árpádian age is questionable due to several reasons. István Kiszely in his publication stated that in the given grave the skeletal remains of four individuals were discovered. In the excavation documentation there is a drawing of the grave depicting a single individual, whose grave was evidently disturbed and robbed, but whose body was in an anatomical order. That person can be identified with the skeleton 57/a of Kiszely’s article, a man in the age of around 55.The chamber itself was filled with soil of a mixed content and rubbish, and it also contained pieces of the sepulchre, those of the rood-screen (lettner), the burnt plates of glass windows, late medieval book mounts and charcoal scraps, presumably the remains of the Turkish arson from the year 1526. Concerning the previous interpretations of the research, a series of doubts can be formulated. Can we convincingly connect Queen Gertrude to a lost skull-fragment of a woman, found in a subsidiary position in a disturbed grave of a man without precise dating? Is there a real basis for the assumption that the main altar was hidden by the sight of a high tomb erected in the first half of the thirteenth century when there were clear Cistercian ordinations against such standing out tombstones in relief? Finally, what is the explanation for placing the grave in the crossing instead of the main apse, in the immediate vicinity of the altar, at a time when the area of the crossing was presumably the most intensively used during the building works of the 1220s and 1230s? In the summer of 2013 the bones of grave No. 57, until now thought to be in an unknown place, were finally identified and also examined. The results modified in many respects István Kiszely’s opinion and made the find assemblage logically more interpretable. On the whole, one can reckon with only two individuals. The remains of the individual 57c were a surprise, since Kiszely identified them as a 40-45 year old man, but they were proved to belong to a woman between the age of 30 and 40. Bone samples from the two skeletons were submitted to C14 analysis. In case of the man’s skeleton it resulted in a narrow time span (1420-1450), which was in concordance with the previous expectations. The measurement on the womans skeletal remains gave a relatively wide chronological frame (1040-1220) and two smaller intervals within. She must have lived either between 1050-1080 or 1150-1215. Eleven-century burials could only occur in the cemetery of the early church, predating the monastic church. Considering the fact that in the period between the second half of the twelfth century and the first decades of the thirteenth century one can not count with the burial of many noble women in the apse and in the crossing. Furthermore, the roughly estimated age (30-40 years) of the skeletal remains, calculated in the absence of the skull fragment, does not differ significantly from the real age of the queen (1185-1213), and thus in principle it can be an assumed possibility that the female bones can be assigned to Gertrude, though an indisputable identification cannot be provided. The grave No. 57 itself is late medieval and probably belonged to an abbot. The damaged and deficient bones which fell into the grave later together with the debris, and which were found in a subsidiary position, might belong to Queen Gertrude. The skull fragment, mentioned in the archaeological reports has not been found yet. The grave No. 57 in the crossing of the Pilis monastic church was most probably not the burial place of the queen herself, and accordingly her sepulchre could not stand upon it. In the opinion of the author the original place of the tomb must have been in close proximity, most probably in the apse. Imre Takács The Questions of the Reconstruction of Queen Gertrude’s Funerary Monument The article deals with the several fragments of an illustrious and well-known art historical monument, the tombstone (sepulchre) of the murdered Queen Gertrude of Andechs-Meran which came to the light during the excavations conducted by László Gerevich from 1967 onwards. The author provides an overview of the art historical reconstructions of this significant sculptural masterpiece and their consequences. The first reconstructional drawings about those fragments of arches, small columns, and sitting crowned and angelic figures prepared by the archaeologist Gerevich himself were published in 1971 supposing that the sepulchre was a kind of baldachin-like construction and stating that the quality and outlook of the carvings points to French masters, suggesting even the possible contribution of Villard de Honnecourt. An earlier idea is also mentioned, namely that Gerevich and his colleagues first considered that the monument was not standing in the space alone, but was attached to the wall. This could have been explained by the fact that before 1981 the dispersed small fragments of the sepulchre excavated could not be 316
