Cseri Miklós, Füzes Endre (szerk.): Ház és ember, A Szabadtéri Néprajzi Múzeum évkönyve 11. (Szentendre, Szabadtéri Néprajzi Múzeum, 1997)

Angol rezümé

form a large-scale collection. Under the research programme of the SIT, between 1941-1943 he spent altogether 67 days in four villages of the Borsa Valley: 28 in Kide, 17 in Kolozsborsa, and 6 in both Csomafája and Bádok. Control collection took place in August, 1943. He also made a less extensive collection for the purpose of comparison in Doboka (Szolnok-Doboka County). As a result of his work seven large-size sketch-books (282 pages) were filled with free-hand drawings carefully inscribed with all the necessary dimensions. „On the average I could prepare 10-11 drawings on a day" he wrote in his notes. László VARGHA recorded his data with the technical precision of an architect and with the respect, an ethnographer feels for objects. His drawings contain the name of each structural element and piece of furniture in a house both in Hungarian and Romanian. The data, necessary in each drawing, he represented in such a way as to enable drawing the ground plan of both cellar and ground floor, as well as the place of the major pieces of furniture, longitudinal and cross-sections and finally the four facades. He also made several ground plans of whole crofts (plots with farmhouse and farm buildings) showing the arrangement of the constructions and representing gardens and fences in detail. Of heating devices, constructional parts of trussing and the techniques of raising walls, he often prepared detail-drawings as reminders. The dates when a dwelling house was built, when certain parts of it were altered or rebuilt as well as the reasons thereof were noted by the drawing. The 130 buildings surveyed were selected by László VARGHA so as to demonstrate the history of the last 150 years of peasant architecture in the four points of research (27 dwelling houses and 36 farm buildings) as well as to document the relics of medieval and later village architecture through sacral structures (5 churches and gravestones). It is a great advantage of his method that he recorded changes and alterations as well as new structures raised at the time collection. The result was a series of comprehensive representations shown from the architectural, historical and sociographic points of view. Parallel with the survey more than 1200 black and white photos were taken. The 6 by 6 and 9 by 12 cm negatives document views of villages and streets, sacral and public buildings, but most of them, in compliance with the aim of research, show peasant houses and other structures around them on the crofts. The photos of interiors, taken by natural light, are irreplaceably valuable. The standard of László VARGHAs pictures is characterized by the sensitivity to even the smallest details and the supply of precise data as described above in connection with his method of survey and collection. In 1945 László VARGHA, who was processing his collection and collected additional data, did not submit the material to the SIT, which ceased to be in the spring of this year. This is how it remained it his possession with the exception of two note books. In 1962 László VARGHA compiled a sample documentation on the basis of which he was looking for a publisher to bring out his book on folk architecture in the Borsa Valley. We know from his correspondence on the project, found after his death, that he had jointly planned with H. H. STAHL, a Bucharest ethnographer and architect to make complementary surveys and take a study tour. The sample documentation and synopsis of the book spent time at the Committee of Ethnography of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, the Chief Administration of Publishing Houses, and the Publishing House of the HAS as well. Monographic aspiration, and inductive method of presentation, the complex approach to and interpretation of vernacular architecture as part of cultural history can clearly be seen from the sketch of the book. By way of introduction he planned to present geographical, historical, statistical and ethnic data, followed by a discussion of principles and methodology. In the next part, the effect of historical and economic factors on the villages examined was to be analyzed in detail with special regard to the formation of the structure of settlement. Then the architecture of the four villages would have been described according to the arrangement of plots, types of building, ground plans, building materials and building construction, formal and aesthetic executions. The whole material of drawings and photos would have made up Part 3. The key-words for Part 4, the summation, are evaluation, historical formation, type, version, innovation, deviation, and ethnic marks. The book would have been completed by notes, bibliography, a triglot (Hungarian, Romanian and German) list of words, and indices of places and subjects. The authors of the volume are ethnographers, museologists at the Hungarian Open Air Museum in Szentendre and editors of the VARGHA bequest. Györgyi H. CSUKÁS and Péter KECSKÉS have written and publish the material on folk architecture, also significant for future research in the Carpathian Basin, meeting the criteria of both sourcebook and historical ethnographic monograph. In the first chapter they summarize the history of research. The second covers, based on their own historical and archival research, the social, economic and ecclesiastical history of the four villages. All this serves as a frame for the summary of folk architecture, the subject of Chapter 3. This includes the following interconnecting units: settlement, croft and yard, building materials and building constructions, furthermore the ground plan of the dwelling house, its heating devices and smoke abatement, the way it is furnished and, finally the farm buildings. In the fourth and longest chapter the sources of the material collected during 1941-45 are published. The descriptions of buildings, the drawings made in the course of architectural surveys, and photos come one after the other in the alphabetic order of the villages (Kide, Bádok, Csomafája and Kolozsborsa). The last part of the book is a supplement containing the notes of István MÉRI on the archaeological excavations during 1942 in Kide, and the photos taken by the authors in 1996 demonstrating changes in vernacular architecture. The volume appears as No. 11 of the annuals issued by the Hungarian Open Air Museum (Szentendre) entitled „Ház és Ember" (House and Man) and also as the first volume of the series entitled „Magyar Népi Építészeti Gyűjtemény Forráskiadványai" (Source-book of the Hungarian Folk Architectural Collection).