Cseri Miklós, Füzes Endre (szerk.): Ház és ember, A Szabadtéri Néprajzi Múzeum évkönyve 7. (Szentendre, Szabadtéri Néprajzi Múzeum, 1991)

NOVÁK LÁSZLÓ: A nagykőrösi ház a 17-19. században

THE NAGYKŐRÖS HOUSE The evolution of the dwelling house in Nagykőrös and, we can say, everywhere in general - took centuries consisting however of larger periods like the end of the 15th and the beginning of the 16th century, the 16th— 18th century period, the end of the 18th and the second half of the 19th century, and the one that began at the end of the 19th century. The possibilities of building were basically determined in Nagykőrös, too, by the local sources of building materials and social conditions. The municipality of the market town of Nagykőrös and the well-to-do layer of the population alike tried to achieve the erection of more and more modern houses using building materials either locally available or obtainable in other regions. At the end of the 14th century and in the 15th century the houses were timber-framed constructions, with either mud-and-stud or daubed wattle in between, with a daubed reeden ceiling topped either with a purlin roof where the ridge beam was supported Y-shaped uprights or with a rafter roof resting on scissors-beams. These buildings consisted of kitchen and room. In the ceiled, smoke-free room there was a tile stove, whereas the kitchen was smoky, with an open hearth at ground level. It was from the fire-place in the corner where the oven, outside the house, was heated. During the next stage of development, in the first half of the 16th century, the heating device of the kitchen changed. Ovens heating the room but stoked in the kitchen were not used any more, and a chimney appeared above the kitchen to exhaust the smoke. The appearance of the firing ledge at the bottom of the wall separating the kitchen from the room can also be dated to this period. In the room the tile stove or kályhás kemence (c. stove oven) stayed on, but in the dwellings of the less well-to-do a mud oven could be found in its place. From the middle of the 18th century dwelling house building underwent significant changes. With fire safety in view houses of thick, strong walls were erected with brick-vaulted kitchens "of stone chimney". It was at about the same time, at the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century, that in these more advanced, spacious kitchens a ledge in the middle of the back wall for the fire became universal to ensure baking and cooking as well as an easier removal of smoke. Vaulted kitchens with a fire place and ledge in the middle of the back wall under an internally accessible flue were considered the most modern and were regularly erected even at the end of the last century. As this more advanced type of house was gaining ground, so disappeared the old, wattle-walled constructions whose purlin roofs, covered with reed-thatch, were supported by Yshaped uprights and where, from time to time, a more archaic heating device could be found. The ideas of town development and the regulation of building practices were realized and brought into effect simultaneously. In the centre of the town and along the main roads only modern buildings, approved by the municipality (i. e. with high foundation, thick, brick-andadobe walls, ceilings of daubed reed on the cross beams, a well proportioned facade of style, and with a rafter roof) could be erected

. In accordance with the spreading of bourgeois civilization, the heating device of the house also changed. Open chimneys enabled the individual heating of rooms where, as heater and ornament of the home, the tile stove kept its place. The old, rick-shaped oven, the banyakemence, was either relegated to the back room or disposed of. Even the kitchens of traditional buildings were transformed. With the erection of internally accessible flues the kitchens with fire-bench in the middle under an open chimney gradually ceased to exist. In the room they still made an oven without ledge but, because it occupied too much of the room, they endavoured to replace it with a factory-made cooking range of iron sheets. In the first half of our century, bourgeois standards furthered the development of dwelling houses. The villas, gentleman's residences, and the burgher's houses were one after the other erected now with a square or rectangular ground plan, brick and adobe walls topped by a slated tent roof. Tile stoves were replaced by iron stoves manufactured in factories. In the kitchen the cooking range served as heating device.