SETTLEMENT STRUCTURE
The settlements of the wine region are located at the meeting point of the Eperjes-Tokaj Mountain, which forms part of North Hungarian Mountains (Északi-középhegység) and the Great Plain (Alföld), a former trade route that bifurcated at Tokaj but continued towards Kassa-Bártfa in both directions. Thanks to this geographical location, these settlements soon became the fora or the exchange of goods with the majority of them allowed to hold not only the nationwide but also weekly markets too.
While the proximity of the trade route enabled the settlements to come into being here, the topographical features of the region fundamentally influenced the visual environment and the structure of the settlements. Starting from the Middle Ages these market towns all had a simple, one-street pattern but their network of streets had become dense and irregular by the end of the 17th century. The original core of each settlement must have been where their churches are standing today. There was a significantly greater number of settlements in the wine region before the Ottomans ravaged it; many of these are at best remembered by the names of slopes.
Medieval one-street settlements are referred to as ‘ribbon-plot’ villages made up of narrow plots side by side. Each plot has the residential building at the street front, the buildings catering to animal husbandry activities are located behind it, and these are followed by the vegetable garden, orchard, vineyard and finally comes the pasture or the forest. It often happened that more than one residential building was built, one behind the other. In most cases the plots were divided longitudinally, thus they became narrower and narrower, up to the point where the width of the street front reached the smallest usable size. Then, since this resulted in the main street ‘having filled up’, new street(s) were opened running parallel to the main street. This is how multi-street settlements developed.
In the past the inner and outlying areas had entirely different appearances. Constructing buildings in the outlying areas, i.e. in the vineyards, was not at all customary, although there were rare examples of one or two small farmstead-like buildings with half a residential and half an agricultural function, or remnants of villages with houses that survived the Ottoman attacks; however, no trace of virtually any of these can be found now. A few aristocratic or sacred buildings are still standing, including the Waldblott castle in Tolcsva, in the Kincsem vineyard, or the Theresa chapel in Tarcal. In the second half of the 20th century weekend cottages were erected on some plots located on more or less easily accessible hillsides. Besides the stone crosses and the vaulted, buttress stone bridges that can be found in the region, the only built structures in the outlying areas that lend them character are the stone piers, bastions and retaining walls that were typically built because of the use of the landscape and viticulture.
The market towns represented a peculiar urban character; their development was facilitated by the flourishing of wine production and commerce alike. The biggest influence on the urbanisation of villages was exerted by the rich towns of Upper Hungary (Felvidék), which provided a model both for the architectural appearance and the settlement pattern here. The most important settlements in Tokaj-Hegyalja have a centre known as the Kassa (Kosice) type, where in most cases the thoroughfare-like core of the settlement is formed by three adjacent streets that meet at their ends. The churches in these settlements are centrally located and in some places they are surrounded by walkable space on all their sides, where the main streets are relatively wide, virtually squares, where markets and fairs were held.
The main street with the most important buildings was the oldest part of a settlement. A significant boundary in the history of these settlements was represented by the conflagrations of the 18th and 19th centuries, which did not spare the historic core of virtually any of the settlements in the region. The oldest houses are not necessarily the most prestigious, but their bases are almost without exception formed by the one-storey, tripartite Hungarian detached house.
The most important buildings of the main street are the mansions of the former landowners, the prominent public institutions, such as the town-hall and the school, as well as the essential buildings with agricultural, commercial and hospitality functions (savings banks, inns, houses of wine traders).
As the rank and consequently the population of the settlements increased, the plots were split up and the main street eventually had an unbroken row of buildings. First, the long one-storey houses, built along the street line and with their vertical axes being perpendicular to it, were first extended with residential and business spaces towards the rear of the plot. As time passed, a room, often used as a retail space, was added to the side of the houses on the street front. This resulted in what is called a bent house, with a more elegant, wider and impressive main facade. These houses only had a distance as wide as a narrow gate between them, and this is how the main street slowly developed a settlement pattern with a row of uninterrupted one-storey buildings; this was in places broken up by what is referred to as the ‘comb development method’ (houses positioned along the street-line like the teeth of a comb) with one-storey houses and prestigious two-storey buildings.
As the main street ‘filled up’, the long and narrow plots running up the hillside were divided in half along the middle (sometime in the mid-17th century), thus creating a new street parallel with the main street. This development overlapped in time with extraneous, i.e. foreign inhabitants settling here in greater numbers. It was in this new street that they built their villa-like houses with many windows and their masses parallel with the street. The churches of the denominations that appeared in the region later (Lutherans, Greek Catholics, Israelites).
The next parallel street, which lay further away from the core of the settlement, was inhabited by diggers, who lived in the simplest houses. Their plots were narrower and virtually in every case terminated in larger gardens, which often ran up the hillside.
Some very interesting links between the ‘parallel’ streets are the narrow alleys, called ‘runners’, which were either one- or two-metre-wide paths but in some cases they were streets suitable for coaches; this depended on how large a section could be separated from the neighbouring plots.
The residential area of the settlements had a part with a distinct character, lived in by the craftsmen and the tradesmen. Here the plots were small and developed irregularly because of the agricultural functions missing from them. They were typically situated by rivers because of the water-intensity of most of the crafts and trades pursued here by the inhabitants.
The cellars in the Tokaj-Hegyalja wine region are characterised by their own settlement pattern and location. Initially, the processing of grape was not connected to cellar buildings, called wine houses. Therefore, most of the cellars were carved into steeper hillsides with only a small structure or portal – their entrance leading down to the cellar – being visible on the outside. They often stood within the perimeter of the residential plots, but clusters of cellars and lanes of cellars were also a common sight in the inner areas of the settlements (Erdőbénye, Mád), or in their outlying areas (Abaújszántó, Hercegkút, Tolcsva).
The above-described factors and processes that shaped the settlements determined the development of the street structure basically up until the 19th century. The population increase that followed, coupled with the trend of improving the supply of housing and, above all, with the presence of planned systems significantly changed the appearance of the expanded settlements within the area of regional development. These changes luckily only rarely affected the historic cores of the settlements, as the housing shortage was typically addressed by including new areas, assigning new plots and creating ‘new rows’.
Gábor Erhardt
Introduction from the book TOKAJ, the architecture of the wine region, 2022.
