A Balaton-felvidék népi építészete. A Balatonfüreden, 1997. május 21-23-án megrendezett konferencia anyaga (Szentendre-Veszprém, 1997)

Gilyén Nándor: A műemléki topográfiák és a népi építészet

Topography of historical monuments and the traditional architecture NÁNDOR GILYÉN The introduction of the essay presents a summary of the development of the protection of historical monuments in Hungary and concludes that the first written work which can be considered as a topography was published in 1859. An organized publishing of topographies, however, did not start before 1948, in spite of the fact that the protection of historical monuments in Hungary produced important results already in the second half of the last century. Up to now, 11 volumes of the series "Topography of Historical Monuments in Hungary" have been brought out. We expect the topography of historical monuments in the county of Veszprém, north of the Lake Balaton, to be published at the beginning of the next millennium. At the beginning, it was not easy for the historical monuments of traditional architecture to win the status of historical monuments at all. László VARGHA, one of the greatest experts on this field, has to take the credit to achieve this. In the third volume of topographies (historical monuments in the county of Nógrád) the traditional architecture is already represented in the form of description of some villages and of a short introductory essay. From the seventh volume on (historical monuments in the county of Heves) we find a description of the traditional architecture of each settlement and a summary essay is being prepared. Furthermore, the author of the essay is searching for an answer to the question what the reason can be of the difficult meeting of the two areas of research, i.e. the history of architecture and the traditional architecture. One of the well-known reasons is that the art history looks at the folk art and within it, at the traditional architecture not really as "grande art" and the ethnology on the other hand, considers it as an art borrowed from higher art. The author sees the other reason in the different working methods of the two sciences, i.e. of the history of architecture and of the ethnography. At last, he would like to point out how much the ethnology can benefit from the topography. A detailed data processing, including all settlements allows the exact definition of the spreading of certain phenomenon in space (and partially even in time). As topography is made within the borders of administrative units, which are not identical with those of ethnographic regions, there is a possibility to mark a more accurate distinguishing of individual regions and of a better discovery of phenomenon in the zones of transition. Historic and archival researches, joining to topography can provide us with useful data from the point of view of traditional architecture as well. After all, topographic research can initiate treatment of ethnographic character in a narrow sense. We should, however, not expect the topography to provide us with monographic elaboration of buildings, settlements or phenomenon, not even with topographic perfection in the subject due to limitations of the research in time and dimension. Therefore, the topography does not constitute more than the foundation of a complete treatment of traditional architecture. 406