Cseri Miklós, Füzes Endre (szerk.): Ház és ember, A Szabadtéri Néprajzi Múzeum évkönyve 10. (Szentendre, Szabadtéri Néprajzi Múzeum, 1995)

ZENTAI TÜNDE: A takaréktűzhely a parasztházban

Tünde Zentai THE RANGE IN THE PEASANT HOUSE For the masses of Hungarian peasantry feudalism came to an end with the abolition of serfdom in 1849. This is the date from which we can reckon the slow unfolding of a bourgeois development entailing changes in the traditional interior decoration. The heating devices in and the methods of smoke removal from the peasant house are renewed. It was in the course of this process that the range found its way, as the villagers followed urban examples, to peasant homes, to stay for about a century. The author describes the spreading of the range in Hungary. Her paper is also significant because this is the first comprehensive survey of the subject which has been given little attention up to now. The structure of ranges is fairly uniform. They were made with mass-produced iron components. The most popular kind of range was constructed of bricks or adobe and fitted out with an iron hotplate and baking box („sütöszekrény"). Smoke was led to the chimney through a closed flue. It was fit for baking, cooking and warming up the room alike, consumed little fuel, and made no mess. As a result of these advantageous properties the range gained ground exceedingly quickly. From its appearance in the middle of the 19th century it reached every corner of Hungary in about five decades. Coming to preponderance in a given place took usually one or two. The way and time of its adaptation, however, differed from region to region. These differences can be explained, beside the various stages of economic development, mainly by the effects of existing, time-honoured heating devices. Tünde Zentai outlines, with the help of archival and ethnographic data, the roughly one and a half century history of the range in the peasant house from the 1840s to our days. Separate analyses are devoted to the change of the heating systems in the Great Hungarian Plain, Upper Hungary, Transylvania and Transdanubia, the acceptance of the range, and the interrelations of the old and new systems. She establishes that the range found most easily its way into the dwelling- rooms of houses standing in level countries, and including an open chimney and an oven stoked from outside. In Central and South-Western Transdanubia, where smoky kitchens had predominated, it entered the kitchen first. It happened simultaneously with the construction of the internally accessible flue, and with a delay compared to other regions, on the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. The final part of the paper presents a hereto unknown combination of a traditional and a new heating device. A constructed range, topped by an iron hotplate, stands in the kitchen and serves for cooking in the village of Hidas (Baranya County). Its oven part, however, crosses the wall and is set up in the room, in the place of the one-time tile stove which was stoked from the kitchen. It is called a stove, and is stoked from outside, i. e. through the kitchen range. This is an experimental piece, of which only a few parallels could be found in Southern Transdanubia. Today it can already be considered a survival, as its counterparts disappeared long ago. The replacement of ranges constructed of brick or adobe with factory-made cooking devices began in the 1940s and was more or less complete by the 1970s.