Karcsa
| Karcsa | |||||
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| Basic data | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| State : | Hungary | ||||
| Region : | Northern Hungary | ||||
| County : | Borsod-Abaúj-Zemplén | ||||
| Small area until December 31, 2012 : | Bodrogköz | ||||
| Coordinates : | 48 ° 19 ' N , 21 ° 48' E | ||||
| Height : | 95 m | ||||
| Area : | 43.68 km² | ||||
| Residents : | 1,730 (Jan. 1, 2011) | ||||
| Population density : | 40 inhabitants per km² | ||||
| Telephone code : | (+36) 47 | ||||
| Postal code : | 3963 | ||||
| KSH kódja: | 21218 | ||||
| Structure and administration (as of 2016) | |||||
| Community type : | local community | ||||
| Mayor : | László Milinki (Fidesz-KDNP) | ||||
| Postal address : | Petőfi Sándor u. 11. 3963 Karcsa |
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| Website : | |||||
| (Source: A Magyar Köztársaság helységnévkönyve 2011. január 1st at Központi statisztikai hivatal ) | |||||
Karcsa is a municipality ( Hungarian község ) in northeastern Hungary in the Cigánd district, which belongs to the Borsod-Abaúj-Zemplén county . The municipality with 1820 inhabitants (as of 2015) on the border with Slovakia is known for a Romanesque church that belongs to the Reformed denomination . The round church , built in the 11th century with originally six cones , was extended by a nave at the beginning of the 13th century and restored in 1970.
Location and traffic
Karcsa is located in the greater region of Northern Hungary, south of the Bodrog River and north of the Tisza , which rises in the Carpathian Forest and crosses Northern Hungary from east to west. The geographic region between the two rivers is called Bodrogköz. The area, which is mainly inhabited by Magyars on the Slovak side , is largely flat to slightly hilly, similar to the Great Plain to the east , to which the 96 meters above sea level of the place roughly correspond. The Karcsa Canal ( Karcsa-csatorna ) flows from the north through the town center, where it is dammed up at a dam, to the south as far as the Tisza. The approximately 2.5 kilometers long Karcsa reservoir is an ecologically valuable area for birds and fish. At the northern end of the lake, 3 kilometers from Karcsa, the Slovak border runs. A larger wetland is the Tiszatelek-Tiszaberceli nature reserve on the banks of the Tisza, named after the village of Tiszatelek ( Tiszatelek-Tiszaberceli Ártér Természetvédelmi Terület ) a few kilometers south of Karcsa. Otherwise, the area is characterized by irregularly laid out, mostly small-parceled fields and a few small forest islands.
The closest town is Sárospatak in the west on the banks of the Bodrog. The 20-kilometer branch line (road No. 3805) from Sárospatak runs through the villages of Vajdácska and Karos (on road 381), six kilometers from Karcsa. This road leads north-east to the neighboring village of Pácin, three kilometers away (with a late-Renaissance castle on the road) and to Nagyrozvágy (ten kilometers in total). There are no roads in other directions. Other neighboring towns are Bodroghalom (eleven kilometers west) and Alsóberecki (eleven kilometers northwest).
A bus runs several times a day from Sárospatak, sometimes with a detour via Alsóberecki to Karcsa and on to Nagyrozvágy. Another bus connection exists to the town of Sátoraljaújhely, about 20 kilometers away . The remote Karcsa is not connected to the railway network.
history
There are no written sources from the 11th century. In the 12th century Pope Urban III mentions . in a document dated June 22, 1187, in which he placed the knightly order of St. John in Hungary, founded in the middle of the 12th century, under his suzerainty, the church for the first time. Accordingly, the Ecclesia S. Margarethae de Charca was subordinate to the center of the order in Esztergom and the parish of Karcsa should have belonged to the oldest land holdings of the order. In a document dated 1238, King Béla IV confirms that the lands of Karcsa and the “Karcsa Monastery” ( monasterii de Harcha ) belong to the possessions of the Knightly Order. According to a document from 1282, a grand master of the main house in Esztergom named Dominik sold his share of the lands of "Carcha" for six silver marks to Count Thomas, who belonged to the Baksa family. Otherwise nothing is known about a monastery of the Baksa family, at the center of which was the church of Karca.
Townscape
The community area is 4370 hectares and the 1820 inhabitants of 2015 live in 659 apartments. In 1960 the population was 2640. Karcsa is a sprawling clustered village with the central intersection on the through road Petőfi Sándor utca , from which Szabadság utca goes south and Táncsics utca goes north. The Karcsa Canal is dammed here. A bus stop, grocery store, restaurant and post office are located near this intersection. The municipal administration ( Polgármesteri Hivatal ) is housed in a new building 200 meters west of the thoroughfare. Some of the houses are built according to traditional construction plans with the gable facing the street on long rectangular plots, in the rear of which vegetables and fruit trees thrive. Other small town-type houses were built after the mid-20th century.
The Reformed Church is around 300 meters north of the intersection. There is also a local museum ( tájház ), a Roman Catholic church ( Avilai Szent Teréz ) in Karcsa and a Roman Catholic chapel ( Kisboldogasszony ) in the Becskedtanya district, two kilometers northwest on road 381, with a good 50 houses .
reformed Church
The Reformed Village Church of Karcsa ( Karcsai református templom ) is one of the most unusual Romanesque buildings in Hungary and is the most important art monument in the Sárospatak area. The Kinship Church, founded by a prince in the second half of the 11th century, was originally a round church with a six-pass plan inside. Of this, three conches are left that form the choir of a nave that was added later.
In the 10th and 11th centuries numerous round churches were built in Eastern Europe, especially in Poland, Bohemia and in what was once larger Hungary as far as Transylvania . The building of Christian churches in Hungary as a whole is related to the spread of Catholicism in Western Europe during the Árpád dynasty , after Stephen I (r. 1000-1038) became the first Christian king of his country and promoted proselytizing. The Romanesque and early Gothic churches, which were built in Hungary between the 11th and 13th centuries, are attributed by art historians to the era of the Árpád dynasty.
In the Middle Ages, from the 11th century to the middle of the 13th century, village round churches in Hungary formed a special form of the otherwise three-part kinship churches of the Kleinandligen, which consist of a nave with a choir in the east and an attached tower in the west. The models of the village round churches were mostly palace chapels, which in turn ultimately go back to the Carolingian palatine chapel in Aachen Cathedral . The oldest Hungarian round church, which possibly served as a direct model for the later, is the palace chapel of Prince Géza (r. 971–997) in Esztergom , which was built between 970 and 990.
The medieval Hungarian round churches, of which there were once more than 60, are of two different types according to their layout. Mostly to the west of the Danube, under Bohemian and Moravian influence, almost circular church buildings were built inside and outside, of which the round church of Öskü , the round church of Saint Anne of Kallósd (end of the 13th century, with a semicircular apse in the east and wall niches all around) and outside of Hungary the rotunda of St. Catherine in Znojmo (Czech Republic), the Georgs rotunda in Skalica (Slovakia), the Margareta church in Šivetice (Slovakia) and the St. Nikolai church in Selo (Slovenia, 13th century) have been preserved.
The original round church of Karcsa represents the second type of central building east of the Danube, whose interior, designed as a four-pass or six-pass complex, was presumably influenced by Armenian models. The village churches of Pápoc (near Sárvár , around 1220) and the parish church also belong to this type von Kiszombor (11th century), which, along with Karcsa, was the only round church in Hungary to be planned and preserved with a six-pass floor plan. In the former Hungarian parish of Gerény (now part of Uzhhorod , Ukraine) there is a Greek-Catholic round church from the 11th / 12th centuries. Century, which originally had six semicircular niches, preserved as the chancel of a rectangular nave that was added later. It represents one of the few other parallels to the church of Karcsa in the area of medieval Hungary.
The round church of Szalonna in north-eastern Hungary from the end of the 11th century, which has an outwardly built semicircular apse, has a special character . Its development can be compared with that of Karcsa, because the church, which soon became too small, was extended to the west by a much larger rectangular hall at the end of the 13th century and a three-conch choir was preserved from the round church.
The round church with its six-pass plan was donated by an apparently powerful prince and could have been modeled on the Palatine Chapel in Sárospatak. The architecture presumably refers to Armenian predecessors. In Armenia, central buildings with four to eight conches were built in the succession of the round church of Zoravar from the 7th century . There are also some round churches in the Caucasus that were built at the same time as the Hungarian ones and their influence is also noticeable in other neighboring countries in Eastern Europe. Since there are no architectural parallels to urban churches in Hungary, no speculations about the possible symbolic significance of the Karcsa six-conch complex are possible. Neither the style influences from the west nor from the east were adopted unfiltered in the Romanesque churches of Hungary. Erzsébet Tompos (1978) points out that all conches in the Armenian central buildings were usually the same size, while in Kiszombor and Karcsa the eastern conches are deepened a little further into the outer wall, which could also refer to Georgian models.
The church of Karcsa was archaeologically examined by Veronika Gervers in the summer of 1964 and restored by the Hungarian National Monument Protection Agency between 1968 and 1970. From these investigations it emerged that the original 11th century building was a rotunda made of brick walls with a diameter of 7.8 meters. As in Kiszombor, the interior was divided by six horseshoe-shaped conches, the east of which contained the altar and was somewhat wider. The outer wall formed a structural unit with the cones, so that they were part of the building statics. At the top, the conches were closed off with round domes and a hexagonal dome spanned across the middle, which was rebuilt in the 18th century to its present form.
Since the round church turned out to be too small, the rotunda was converted into a choir in the 12th century, to which a rectangular nave was added. Here, three of the six cones had to be removed from the inside, while the outer circular shape was largely retained except for the passage created in this way on the west side. The individual construction phases could be traced through the excavations. In the second stage of construction, the nave was roughly where it is today, according to the foundation walls, and the rotunda served as a choir. In addition, the foundations of two rectangular chambers that were built on the north and south sides of the rotunda came to light. They could have served as separate chapels and were accessible from the rotunda, or at least there were signs of passages. In this construction phase there were no pillars in the nave, which must have been covered with a wooden roof structure. Since neither brick nor stone rubble was found around the church, the walls were possibly made of adobe or rammed earth .
At the end of the 12th century the building structure must have been in poor condition or the church must have become unusable for some other reason, because the walls of the nave were completely removed and rebuilt in the same place with carefully hewn stone blocks. At this time Karcsa was owned by the crusaders of St. Stephen from Esztergom, who planned an elaborate three-aisled church, but the completion of the church was prevented by the nationwide devastation caused by the Mongol storm in 1241 . The rotunda would have been removed if the plan had been implemented. In the place of the triumphal arch , the foundations of two bundle pillars emerged. For the three-aisled vault, rows of alternating pillars and columns were provided, of which bases and fighters were found during the excavations around the building. The triumphal arch was started with stone blocks and later continued with bricks; the middle pillars were not erected. Instead, in this third construction phase, detached from the planning, the nave was simply connected to the rotunda so that the building could be used for church services.
At the beginning of the 13th century, another group of craftsmen, who were under Lombard and French influence, resumed work and shaped the design of the south wall, the portal on the west wall and the gallery in the west. Typical of the Lombard style and Tuscany are the facade with blind arcades and the positioning of two lion figures on consoles on the west wall on the side above the portal arch. Both stylistic elements are atypical for the Hungarian Romanesque, similarly arranged lions can only be found in Hungary on the ruins of the monastery church of Vérteskeresztúr in the west of the country. The west portal, on the other hand, is influenced by the Romanesque style in France. It is a stepped portal with a cladding of five columns, which end with capitals and continue in the round arch as circumferential bulges. The portal is surmounted by a gable with a step frieze, the wall surface of which is structured by stepped blind arcades.
This construction phase remained unfinished. Without building a church tower, the craftsmen gave up their activity in the middle of the 13th century and left some building materials behind when they retired. The reasons for this are unknown, but there are several legends circulating in folk lore. One of them is a fairy tale with fairies that once lived in Lake Karcsa. The beautiful queen of fairies suffered from the stalking of the Prince of Darkness, who lived in the nearby Nagykövsed Castle . Because of him, the fairies were forced to leave their underwater palace. To commemorate their place of residence, they moved the palace to the lake shore, where it became the Church of Karcsa. But because the fairies could only work until the first cockcrow in the early morning, the tower of the palace (church) remained unfinished. In any case, the fairies are responsible for the carefully carved stone blocks, while the evil prince is the Mongols. Other legends revolve around historical events.
What all legends want to explain is the incomplete state of the church. This is related to the impoverishment of the region, which probably began before the Mongol storm in 1241 and culminated in the sale of the church to the Baksa family in 1282 due to the plight of the order. The quick and purely purpose-oriented completion of the church is therefore likely to have taken place under the Baksa family.
The preserved nave is made of natural stone and the rotunda is made of bricks. The outer wall of the rotunda is adorned with a jagged frieze below the eaves and a round arch frieze below. The entire facade is divided into half columns. The roofs protruding far from both structures are covered with wooden shingles. A few meters from the church there is a free-standing wooden belfry with a simple, functional construction.
Inside, only the two mighty pillars of the three-aisled church interior remained, which support the masonry loft in front of the west wall. The depiction of two men fighting over a woman and the fight of two dragons on the lower capital of the southern pillar of the gallery are unusual . As is customary in Calvinist churches, there is no altar in the choir. The pastor preaches from a small platform at the transition between the choir and the nave.
literature
- Veronika Gervers: The Romanesque Church of Karcsa. In: Gesta, Volume 7, The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the International Center of Medieval Art, 1968, pp. 36-47
- Erzsébet Tompos: Relations of Hungarian Architecture in the XI. Century. Analysis of the shape of the central six-lobed church type. In: Periodica Polytechnica Architecture, Volume 22, Nos. 3-4, 1978, pp. 149-171
Web links
- Official website (Hungarian)
- Karcsa. Buildings and Monuments of Art History in Hungary: Age of Romanesque. zauberhaftes-ungarn.de
Individual evidence
- ↑ Magyarország közigazgatási helynévkönyve 2015. január 1. Központi Statisztikai Hivatal Hungarian Central Statistical Office, Budapest 2015, p. 44
- ↑ Elevation of Karcsa, Kun Béla et al. 27, Hungary. elevation.maplogs.com
- ^ Karcsa-tó. karcsa.hu
- ↑ Veronika Gervers, 1968, p. 44
- ↑ Veronika Gervers, 1986, p. 45
- ↑ See Ioan-Cosmin Ignat: Romanesque Ecclesiastical Architecture on the Periphery of the Catholic World. Round Churches and Basilicas in Transylvania. In: Sorin Radu (ed.): Studia Universitatis Cibiniensis. Series Historica, Volume 13 Supplement, “Lucian Blaga” University of Sibiu Publishing House, 2016, pp. 169–199, here pp. 178f
- ↑ Béla Zsolt Szakács: The research on Romanesque architecture in Hungary: a critical overview of the load twenty years. In: Estratto dalla rivista Arte Medievale nuova serie anno IV, No. 2, 2005, 2, pp. 31–44, here p. 32
- ↑ Veronika Gervers-Molnar: Origins of Romanesque Rotundas in East-Central Europe . In: Canadian-American Review of Hungarian Studies, Volume 2, No. 2, Fall 1975, pp. 123-129, here pp. 123, 125
- ↑ Veronika Gervers, 1968, p. 37
- ^ Anneliese Keilhauer: Hungary. Culture and art in the land of the Magyars. DuMont Buchverlag, Cologne 1990, p. 55; Veronika Gervers, 1968, p. 39
- ^ The Greek Catholic Church - Horjani. ( Route of Medieval Churches ) templomut.hu/uk
- ↑ Veronika Gervers, 1968, p. 38
- ↑ Dezső Dercsényi, Balázs Dercsényi: Art guide through Hungary. Corvina Kiadó, Budapest 1974, p. 139
- ↑ Erzsébet Tompos, 1978, p 159
- ↑ Veronika Gervers, 1968, pp. 37–41
- ↑ Veronika Gervers, 1968, p. 43
- ↑ Veronika Gervers, 1968, pp. 44f
- ↑ István Genthon: monuments in Hungary. A picture guide. Scientific Book Society, Darmstadt 1974, p. 401