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

Előadások / Presentations - SISA Béla: Folk houses

value of the funding was that it enabled the purchase of buildings and thus they became state property. Dr. Géza Barcza developed this project and as a result the number of folk houses increased from 40 to 200 in ten years. Thus every area in Hungary, even the smallest village had a folk house. The project did not set the aim of making these houses into objects for communal use, but to ensure their existence and protection with a complete monument restoration, research and the continuous supervision of their renovation. The majority of the renewed and restored buildings participating in the project became folk houses, museums, which offered the residents of the villages to keep the objects of the past under conditions to their merit. The placement of museum objects and the furbishing were the task of ethnographers. We can still be rightly proud today of the results that were achieved. We expected of the change of system that these characteristically nice buildings expressing Hungarian culture would enjoy increased protection. Unfortunately this did not happen, The old, stale ownership ceased, and most buildings passed to the ownership of local authorities. Since the folk houses do not produce any profit and they are hardly visited, they only cause problems. The new ownership relations mean danger with regard to their perpetuance. The maintenance of the buildings and their contents must be secured. In order to do this my colleagues and I have worked out a programme. We made a survey of the local needs on the basis of local data. The project based on the survey received the green light after a long process of lobbying the ministry. A sum of 30 million forints was allocated for the owners of the buildings to maintain the properties, while they have the accounting liability for the six years of the project. The programme has been in operation for two years and as the result shows nearly all the buildings, folk houses operating as museum have been rescued. They were not turned into pubs or holiday homes, etc. Although they are no longer owned by the state, state funding has been secured. We also had negotiations with the Ministry of Culture in parallel with the project. We would have liked to achieve that each folk house had a caretaker employed for eight hours every day at least to ensure regular airing of the buildings. Without residents and with no maintenance they are very volatile and gradually decay. The programme started but for administrative and other reasons stopped in a year. A total of 10,000 buildings are under monument protection in Hungary. 2000 of these are folk monuments, approximately 20% of all Hungarian listed monuments. Nearly all the funding has been withdrawn from folk monuments, and there has been no financial funding for renovation for two years. Thus we can say that there are no funds for monument restoration on a full scale. But there have always been 'eccentrics' and well-intentioned people and thus life does not come to a standstill. There have been private folk houses springing up and a few villages have found the way to establish a folk house, collecting historical data. Thus the number of folk houses has increased by 15 to 20 in the past two years. The above mentioned project has resolved the position of the buildings renovated earlier. We would like to handle the rescue of endangered monuments in a separate programme. The preparation for a rescue programme of wind, water and dry mills is underway. These buildings have not been used since 1962. Then their operation was made impossible, they are privately owned and a family is not able to do anything with machinery requiring continuous maintenance. We have similar ideas in respect to wooden towers and other ecclesiastical monuments, too. A survey of cemeteries was conducted with huge impetus and several hundred people were involved in rescuing cemeteries and saving wooden and stone tomb signs. There are two cemeteries under folk monument protection. One has boat shaped wooden grave-markers while the other is a Calvinist cemetery with tomb stone markers on the northern side of Lake Balaton. If the cemeteries are closed, if burials stop, decay will begin due to the lack of continuous maintenance. Besides the restored buildings operating as museums, owners of buildings have had financial support since 1974. This means a few thousand forints, which is enough to whitewash the building or undertake small