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

Előadások / Presentations - Kristina MARKUŠOVA: Restoration of the Saint Elizabeth Church in Kassa

KRISTINA MARKllSOVÁ RESTORATION OF THE SAINT ELIZABETH CHURCH IN KASSA „...Kassa has seventy churches. One of them is the Kassa-bán Church. Every dome, the entire surface of the walls, and the windows of this fine church are decorated by stone pillars, black, white, red and valuable woods of other colours, like Indian mother-of-pearl, and the cowled priests have a place of congregation ornamented with gold, Yemen rubies, topaz, garnets and similar precious stones. Some of the handles and gateposts on its doors are made of pure silver, and the church is adorned by several thousand precious-stonestudded pure gold lamps and chandeliers, just like the resurrection church in Jerusalem, ...there are about three thousand priests, monks and servants here, who under their rules serve by burning aloe and ambergris..." (Description by Evlia Cselebi, Turkish traveller, quoted by Béla Wick in The St Elizabeth Cathedral in Kassa). When the Kassa bishopric was founded in 1804, the St Elizabeth parish church, as it had been up to then, was raised to the level of a diocesan cathedral. It condition, however, was not entirely commensurate with the task. The religious wars, the anti-Habsburg campaigns, and the city fire in 1775 had taken their toll on the church's decorations and even on its fabric. In 1834 these were added to by earthquake, and in 1845 by flood, so that in 1852 the new bishop, Ignác Fabry, pressed for thorough repairs to be made to the church. In 1857, he founded the St. Elizabeth Church Society, whose members subscribed to the proposed repairs. This „Fábry Restoration" was carried out between 1857 and 1863: the entrance statues were repaired or replaced, the shingle roof was replaced by two-colour glazed tiles, the windows received new stained glass, the south vestibule was repaired and the entire interior of the church was painted, filling the cracks under the plaster and paint. The artist commissioned for this was Franz Wretlund of Vienna. Unfortunately the restoration did not deal with the building's load-bearing structure, despite the obvious damage it had suffered. Some pillars were displaced from the vertical, the vaults were cracked, and in some places plaster was falling out from between the ribs. We know little of this restoration. Some view is given by Viktor Myskovszky's drawings, which show romantic decorative paintwork on the interior of the church. The neglect of maintenance showed up after the violent storm of 1875, when the cathedral almost became structurally dangerous. The bishop of the time, János Perger, warned the government of this. As a result of repeated urging from many sides, the Hungarian National Monuments Commission (MOB) sent an expert commission to Kassa to assess the situation. On the recommendations of the commission, thorough restoration commenced in May 1877. The work was entrusted to architect Imre Steindl, professor at Budapest Technical University. He minutely examined the positioning of the outside walls' buttresses, and compared this with the positions of the internal columns, finding considerable discrepancies. The parlous condition of the load-bearing structure led him to the conclusion that the church had to be reconstructed. His was to implement what he hypothesised as the original architect's vision for the internal arrangement of the church, and to divide the existing three-nave space into five naves by erecting further pillars. This reconstruction was in the „puritán" spirit, by which existing buildings were converted following the general principles of Gothic architecture, „improving" them according to „pure Gothic style". The results of the „Steindl Restoration" were new internal pillars, new vaulting of the naves and the transept, together with new walls, a new canopy for the south tower, a new choir, new buttresses to the walls