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

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

around the sanctuary, a lantern tower above the intersection of the main nave and the transept, neo-Gothic turrets on the exterior buttresses, new gutter spouts, sills, parapets, and several new window traceries. The St Joseph side-chapel was removed from the north-west side of the church, because its ..insufficiently pure" style was considered an interference. Originally Steindl re-drew the entire western facade: he wanted to reduce the unfinished south tower down to the height of the side nave and the north tower by one storey, to be able to rebuild both of them out of elaborately carved stonework to the uniform height of 60 m. He also planned a double spiral staircase for the upper part of the south tower, obviously inspired by the existing „royal staircase". However, he was unable to justify the technical necessity of this large-scale plan, and the governing committee deleted the conversion of the towers on grounds of cost. The result of this piece of niggardliness is something we can be glad of now, but in the reconstruction of the sanctuary between 1877 and 1882, cheaper and less durable sandstone from Szepesolaszi (Spisské Vlachy) was used, a decision which very soon severely punished. This was noticed in time, and so much better-quality sandstone was brought for the rest of the work from Királyka (Králiky), beside Besztercebánya. The carved neo-Gothic decorations for the shrine made from Szepes sandstone (main ledge, balustrade, gutter spouts, buttresses) had degraded so far by the 1920s that their upper parts had to be removed because falling pieces were a danger to traffic around the cathedral. What happened to the original Gothic stones removed from the church? Elements of the stone parapet, several buttresses and a piece of the portal found their way into the romantic garden of the Jakab house in Kassa (this garden no longer exists, and the stones have disappeared). The Jakab family's company was the main contractor for the reconstruction. The Government, as the source of funds, instructed its officials to try to sell the old stones at a good price, eking out the construction budget. All elements of the choir were bought by the Austrian Baron Wilczek, who built them into his romantic castle (of Disneyland dimensions) which he was constructing in Kreuzenstein, which is about 20 km up the Danube from Vienna. The former choir is incorporated above the corridor linking the castle's two internal courtyards, in the form of an arcade, and can still be seen in the Wilczek family's private museum under the name „Kaschauer Gang". A holy female statue, obviously lifted from a doorway, had an even more colourful fate. It was placed into a niche on the front wall of a small suburban house. The suburb was demolished in the 1970s to build a housing estate. Luckily an expert noticed the brightly painted, but rather knocked-about statue among the rubble, and it was taken into the collection of the North Slovak Museum. What actually remained of the medieval St Elizabeth Church after such a major intervention? In the sanctuary, the original stones of the wall, the vaulting and the interior of its buttresses, as did the chancel arch, the stone-carved tower-shaped sacrament house, the church's outside walls up to a certain height, the double spiral staircase accessible from the south chapel, the south tower (still unfinished), the north tower (here there were only minor additions). The chapels were also left structurally unchanged, but the degraded or missing statues were replaced with new neogothic versions. The roof structure was replaced and clad with five-coloured glazed roof tiles - the tiles were made by Zolnay of Pécs. Steindl even had himself recorded in the building: the middle of five male heads on the frieze above the south chapel is Imre Steindl's portrait, and the others are people who were involved in the restoration, such as Ottó Sztehlo. The south buttress of the chancel also contains a narrow spiral staircase leading to the attic, and entered from outside through a little portal. The middle of the portal arch contains the portrait of Joseph Weber, who was the site architect for the reconstruction between 1877 and 1870. After his death his job passed to Vilmos Fröde. New pillars were erected in the interior of the church, carved from fine-grained Királyka sandstone. There was an attempt to match the original stonework (in the shrine, for example) to the new stone by painting the old surface with liquid cement slurry, (Removing this has been one of the difficulties of the current