Bereczki Ibolya - Cseri Miklós (szerk.): Ház és ember, A Szabadtéri Néprajzi Múzeum évkönyve 22. (Szentendre, Szabadtéri Néprajzi Múzeum, 2010)
H. Csukás Györgyi: Pinceajtók a Balaton-felvidéki szőlőhegyeken
Györgyi H. Csukás CELLAR DOORS IN THE VINEYARDS OF THE BALATON-UPLANDS The cellars, in which wine was produced in earlier times, where the press, the vessels needed for grape harvest, the equipment for cultivating the vineyards were stored and the wine ripened, are scattered on the plots of individual owners in the vineyards of the Balaton-Uplands. The cellar in the vineyard served occasionally as living quarter and hay-shed. Nowadays cellars are no more considered as parts of the farm set up outside the farmstead; many have been destroyed or are used as weekend houses. Although vineyard buildings have been often reconstructed, they still preserve many valuable details. Cellar doors, for example represent such types, which are no more present in villages; their locks are characteristic only for the vineyards. When in the 18 t h century the place of wine production and storing was put outside the village into the vineyard, the vineyard cellar consisted normally of two rooms: the press house and the cellar but the building was often completed with a room. Generally, the building was a stone construction and the cellar had a stone barrel vault. Some buildings have preserved their timbered, hewn oak single-doors. The boards of the doors are fixed to two cross-pieces with wooden nails. These heavy doors were fixed without iron parts, they turned on wooden hinges and they were locked with wooden bolts. This lock system was known everywhere in Europe in earlier times. The cellars in the Balaton-Uplands have preserved the type, in which the locking device was hidden in a joist reaching up to the ceiling, placed behind the door-post. One could reach through the bolt-hole and draw the bolt with an iron key. Since the cellars in the Balaton-Upland used to be built with stone walls already in the 18 t h century, the locking devices mainly known in wooden constructions had to be modified. Sometimes joists were fixed in the sill piece and the lintel by cotter-joint in front of the joist hiding the locking device to make impossible to break up the stone wall. The oak doors with the traditional lock systems kept the elements of wooden architecture as well as the ceilings with crossbeams in stone-walled cellars. From the turn of the 18 t h -19 t h century the hewn oak doors were gradually replaced by two-layered covered doors with iron hinges. The locksmith produced the lock of these doors with nails and handle. The oak boards of the two-winged doors were covered with pine-laths having profiled edges and they were ordered in geometrical patterns. The laths were fixed to the oak boards with iron stud nails. These doors produced by joiners served not only safety purposes but had a high aesthetic value as well. The cellars' size and shape mirror the rather different financial conditions and social positions of the vineyard owners (nobles, town-dwellers, bourgeois, serfs, cotters, local population and settlers from other regions). The frequent sales and the change of owners favoured the spreading of architectural elements, solutions and novelties. Cellars in the vineyards have preserved such door types up to now, which have been outplaced from dwelling houses in earlier times due to the wide-scale use of wainscoted doors which needed fewer raw materials and showed more resistance against warping. Earlier our scientists often came to the conclusion regarding the German type houses in Hungary that German settlers in Hungary had taken over ready houses, while in other places, we find building traditions taken over from Hungarian village dwellers. All have agreed that the German house type was not present in the Carpathian Basin; the immigrants have not left behind a characteristic architectural heritage. In contradiction to the general statements based on earlier local studies, researches carried out recently in the region called "Swabian Turkey" prove that the architecture brought here by German settlers after the Turkish occupation was not only present but even preserved by later generations. The most significant and spectacular evidence of this fact is the timber structure. The characteristics of this Western European technology are different from the generally applied constructions erected on ground sills in Southern Iransdanubia. The master builders of the German houses followed the German traditions in design and construction technology: The horizontal timbers between sill-beams and wall-plates, the noggin-pieces keep the structure strong and stable. The front façade has a special geometric pattern of braces (herringbone bracing) and the back gable has a simplified timber structure. We find a way of traditional use of space in the loft: hewn partition walls separate the loft into three rooms, while an interior ceiling built at the level of the beams laid on the middle purlin divide the loft into two stories. Grain was stored in the loft following strict rules. The loft's function, the important economic role of grain storing decided about the measures and proportions of the German houses. The dominant look of the houses mirrors the use of the loft: unusual steep roofs with an inclination at an angle of 48-52°. The German houses can be followed up through three generations: the first generation built timber frame walls. The second generation constructed fix walls with the typical roofs of timber frame houses. The third generation was using certain elements of the timber frame technology but real timber frame houses were not built any more. 102
