GERMAN TOWNSCAPE ELEMENTS ON THE EXAMPLE OF VILLAGES IN BARANYA COUNTY

Abstract

Germans are the largest ethnic minority group of Hungary after the Roma population and
the largest concentration of ethnic Germans of Hungary is in Baranya county. The
townscape of the villages with sizable ethnic German population is different from the other
villages because of the types, the style of the houses and the spatial structure of the villages.
In this paper we give a brief overview of the history of the ethnic Germans in Hungary and
the changes of the number and regional distribution of Germans by the database of different
censuses of Hungary. The field of the study is Baranya county, where we took a field work
in 10 selected villages to find townscape elements connecting with the (sometimes just
former) ethnic German population and detect bilingual scripts in the villages. The
architectural style of the local houses was special with extremely large houses with terrace
and large barns in the back side of the plots. In the most prosperous villages we can find
only very few of these houses, but in the laggard traditional ones large number of these old
houses remained. In some villages, especially in Feked and Óbánya the old houses renewed,
in some other places (Tófű, Baranyaszentgyörgy, Cseledoboka) the conditions of these
houses is really bad. Even there are 30-40% of German population in most of these villages
we can find just a few bilingual scrips in the villages, mainly the official ones (place name
plate, mayor’s office, culture house). These villages are in transition, some of them loose the
ethnic German characteristics, other ones try to preserve them.