A műemlékek sokszínűsége (A 28. Egri Nyári Egyetem előadásai 1998 Eger, 1998)

Előadások / Presentations - ROMÁN András: Historic towns as monuments

may differ largely from one another in age, attitude, welfare, culture but share the same condition of being from, say, Prague, Beijing or Pécs. This does not go for any other type of monuments. One can find monuments which are rarely visited by people, e.g. ruins hidden on the top of a hill or in a forest. There are other monuments where people go more often, like churches, they may even live in them, like in urban or rural houses. Still, churches, houses, and even public buildings and factories may do without people for some time. Towns may not. Especially not since the human aspect of towns always manifests itself socially. The human or social aspect highlights the significance of protecting the integrity of towns. For people are from Prague, Beijing or Pécs but much less from Ëizkov, Chong-weng-qu or Tettye. Not to mention that not only those living inside Schweidel street consider that they are from Győr or, even, Inner Győr, and it is equally unlikely that people living on avenue Andrássy should have a substantially different identity than those living at Liszt Ferenc square. Or if they do, it is not for that reason. So, architectural sites may be logical entities in architectural terms, but not in social terms. (There may be exceptions to that rule, though, the inhabitants of Wekerle district, for instance, do have a special Wekerlean identity.) Therefore, with regard to the social context, the protection of any sites torn out of the remaining part of the town is artificial and fake. The human and social element as a monument shaping component has several further implications as well. The most important among them is what the Charter for Historic Towns describes when it says: „The participation and the involvement of the residents are essential for the success of the conservation programme and should be encouraged. The conservation of historic towns and urban areas concerns their residents first of all." One may reply to this that when it comes to the restoration of, or any other intervention affecting, any monument, the owner has a decisive role to play, but in the case of towns, it is more than that. Because the population does not own the town, it rather composes it. It composes the manifold character, the identical and opposite interests, the conflicts inherent in towns. The owner of an individual monument usually knows what he or she wants and takes position accordingly. In a town there are various conflicting positions and compromise has to be reached to solve the differences when decisions are made about the future of the town. Those who have ever participated in making decisions about monument-related issues at the scale of a town or an urban area may prove me right. Considering the town as a historic monument makes it very complex to deal with it. But that is normal: since towns are the most complex among historic monuments, so is their management. This increased complexity has two aspects. First, even more disciplines are involved than in the case of individual monuments. Besides architects, art historians, archaeologists, heraldists and the specialists of many other specific fields, here you also need town planners, traffic experts, the specialists of at least five types of utilities, sociologists, town historians, garden architects, ecologists, demographers, health care specialists and many others. Increased complexity is also due to the fact that each part of the town requires a different degree of protection effort. This, actually, goes for many individual monuments as well: the historic quality of a castle extends to the whole lot it was built on, to the garden and annexes, but conservationists shall take more care of a ceremonial hall with wall paintings and stuccoes than a pigsty or an icepit at the back of the lot. In the case of towns, this means that historic areas in the strict sense of the word need a radically different depth and type of care than many new districts in the town. This problem has been partly solved in Hungary, but this partial solution is not reassuring. In our country, planning permission affecting individual monuments is granted by the monument protection authority, acting as a planning authority, which is the most effective protection ever. As for sites of historic significance, the monument protection authority acts as a so-called specialised authority, which means it has to be consulted by the local government issuing any planning