Cseri Miklós, Füzes Endre (szerk.): Ház és ember, A Szabadtéri Néprajzi Múzeum évkönyve 9. (Szentendre, Szabadtéri Néprajzi Múzeum, 1994)

KNÉZY JUDIT:Az alföldi mezőgazdasági munkáslakások berendezése 1910-ben Erdélyi Mór fényképfelvételein

FURNITURE IN THE HOMES OF AGRICULTURAL LABOURERS IN THE GREAT HUNGARIAN PLAIN IN 1910 IN PHOTOGRAPHS TAKEN BY MÓR ERDÉLYI The paper analyses the photos taken by Mór Erdélyi (1866-1934), a Hungarian photographer of note on the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, of the interiors of houses inhabited by poor peasants in the Great Hungarian Plain in 1910. The data found out about the circumstances of shooting the pictures are also given. Erdélyi sold 131 photographs to the Museum of Agriculture in 1910 taken of rows of peasant houses, single houses, plots with dwelling-house and outbuildings, and interiors. The houses, streets, and housing estates chosen were either built at the cost of the peasants themselves with contributions from the state or planned and erected for the municipality then allocated to landless agricultural labourers with a family against paying back a long-term loan by instalments. The state support of constructing flats for agricultural labourers was initiated by Ignác Darányi. Minister of Agriculture, in 1901, and was given the force of law in article XLVI of 1907. Regrettably no more than 32 pictures remain of the series bought by the Museum of Agriculture in 1910. Five represent the details of front rooms; four of kitchens, comprising a fireplace under an open chimney (kéményalja) preceded by a small passage (pitar), open to the roof and entered from the courtyard; and three of back rooms. The towns and villages, where the dwellings represented in the surviving pictures are from, are Zenta, Hódmezővásárhely, Makó, Csorvás, Békéscsaba, Csongrád, and Püspökladány. The plots allocated for the building of such houses ranged between 240 and 320 négyszögöls (1 négyszögöl = 3.57 m

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), in some places were even smaller. The houses planned and erected for navvies, reapers and other seasonal contract labourers were to comprise a room, a kitchen and a pantry. The construction of fence, gate, and outbuildings were the responsibility of the inhabitants using their own resources. On some of these housing estates the fences and gates were all alike, on others they showed differences. Looking at the photos it seems that populous families used the back chamber, originally intended to be the pantry, as a second room. Heating, cooking and baking took place here in a home-made, brickwalled kitchen range, whitewashed, topped by an iron plate and fitted out with a door, an oven, and a water heater of the same material. In other back rooms a factory-made, small, light, portable, metal kitchen range could be found. One or two beds, a chest, a small wardrobe, and a shelf for dishes were also kept here. Front rooms were usually heated by a rick-shaped earthenware oven stoked from outside, and their furniture was mostly of parallel arrangement. Most of the kitchens did not have an open chimney any more but a walled, internally accessible flue. In the few surviving pictures of room interiors one would look in vain for the traditional pieces of furniture (corner bench, „thinking chair" [with a semicircular back, and usually occupied by the head of the family], corner cabinet, beds with high, ornate headboard, a mirror in carved and painted frame, or a cradle), painted with flowers, as it had been characteristic of the Great Hungarian Plain. Furniture painted in a single colour, lacquered, or flogged, took their place. However several traditional elements of interior decoration can be found e.g. the room and kitchen walls are hand-painted in Békéscsaba; there are beds piled high with pillows and eiderdown everywhere: ornate bedcovers; the way chairs are arranged in front of the beds; the so-called „holy corner" decked with devotional objects between the windows looking onto the street or a bit father back on top of the chest of drawers; the position and rank of the different kinds of dishes on the wall, shelves, and sideboard in the kitchen. The pictures of Mór Erdélyi are highly valuable documents representing the way of life of landless poor peasants in the Great Hungarian Plain during the years immediately preceding the First World War. They even give some insight into the way they looked at things. They also signal changes. The furniture in the room is no longer arranged cornerwise, there is no corner-bench, and there is no open chimney above the kitchen which is not entered any more through a passageway, open towards the roof. The inhabitants are not crowded into one room; they rather use the pantry for a second room. Urban influences are also felt. Dishes of china and hard pottery (keménycserép), lace curtains, oilcloth table-clothes, strips crocheted or made of paper scalloped by scissors to decorate the edges of kitchen- and wardrobe shelves, various doilies and covers, decorations of artificial flower, vases, etc. indicate that the demand and taste of these peasant families have changed although in directions not desirable in every respect.