upper eaves (a) and the lower eaves (b) surround the log fabric on three sides and ends levelled with the eastern gable. The rafters over the small sanctuary were mainly sized in relation to the larger roof and secondarily with the width of the sanctuary. Scale drawing: July 1997.
a
91 Budeşti Josani. A section through the largest known church room of wood from
Maramureş in the past (above) uncover the problem at the upper eaves purlins, as they appeared twisted out of their position by the heavy roof. The solution was to build a gallery under the eaves purlins to unload them to the lower joints (below). If the galleries were built from the beginning the upper eaves purlins would have more effectively worked laid horizontally. Scale drawing and picture from August 1997.
been the Gothic roof with gables, where the entire load was led to the long lateral walls. In these wooden churches, too, the roof unloaded only on the lateral eaves purlins, and therefore the two cross purlins were more or less unnecessary. They were often excluded from the eastern gable (90), while on the west they were mainly maintained for a short widening of the roof protecting the facade. In other words, the carpenters were not anxious with the strains outside the gables of the vault and therefore they speared time excluding the cross purlins near them. In exchange, they focused on the situation of the roof in between those gables, where vital decisions were to be made.
The entire stability of the roof relied on the strength of the lateral eaves purlins in between the extending consoles of the gables. The larger the roof was, the heavier it became and the greater the risk was for the eaves purlins to yield. In its turn, the size of the roof was conditioned by the vault it protected, and further down by the sacred room itself. And, actually, it was down there, in the need to increase the capacity of the room to receive larger congregations, the entire problem originated. By changing our perspective, we can see that the master carpenters started their work on the ground with the future roof in mind as one of its greatest concerns.128
The most illustrative example for an analysis is the parish church from Budeşti Josani (1643; 91). This construction presents the largest nave of all
surviving in Maramureş from the 17th and 18th centuries, with the inner spans of
812 cm across and 881 cm along the room, and a floor area of about 71.5 sq m. On its way up to erect the room, the master carpenter used inner braking consoles not only to prevent bends in the walls but also to reduce the spanning of the vault to about 7 m. Outside, the resulting span of the raftering was 7.8 m. At this spanning, the rafters built an impressive roof with large sides exposed to winds and heavy precipitations. Because the master carpenter wanted a free and elegant vault inside, the rafters were not tightened together by any tie beam through the nave and therefore the entire roof load and side thrust were transmitted to the lateral eaves purlins. Although these purlins were really massive, without other supports along the 8.8 m long distance between the consoles of the gables they were the weakest parts of the construction. In normal cases, the purlins were laid with their wider
side horizontally to take well over the side thrust, but in Budeşti Josani the load of
the roof was so substantial that the purlins were laid vertically instead. Otherwise it was a great risk the purlins would have broken in the middle of the distance between the brackets supporting them. However, the problem continued even after the church was finished and therefore it was necessary to come back and build an additional structure of posts forming arcades under these lateral eaves purlins. This additional gallery like structure strengthened the purlins and improved the transfer of the heavy roof load to the corners of the building. Despite appearances, there was no decorative purpose behind this addition in the first hand, but a serious technical necessity.
This astonishing church must have been seen and admired by many carpenters, clerics and laymen thereafter. A century after its completion, the bishop Manuil Olsavszky of Mukachevo remarked this church as "ample and magnificent", most likely alone among hundreds of others he visited in 1751-52.129
Later in the 19th century the wooden church was famous long beyond the county
limits and described for the first time in 1847 in a periodical from Buda.130
128
Peter Sjömar demonstrated the real problem in the Scandinavian log churches from the 17th and 18th centuries was the coverings for the increasingly larger rooms demanded by growing parishes. Sjömar 2000, 125-145. The situation from Maramureş was not different, only the response to it.
129
DAZO, 151, 839/1745, 2v.
130
However, the practical experience gained here probably made the carpenters aware and cautious to engage in such large churches.
In the decades following the large construction from Budeşti Josani, several
churches were built, many of them with earlier proved prudent solutions to unload the roof. Was it just a coincidence or the church carpenters really learned
something from there? For example, in Apşa din Jos (1659) the rafters ended inside
the lateral eaves purlins and the purlins were a few centimetres laid over the
wall.131 An even more radical solution was applied in Corneşti, probably under the
major repairs from 1670s (92). With this occasion, the two lateral eaves purlins were probably moved right on the top of the wall to be also used as the springs of the vault inside. The load was thus directly transferred to the walls and their joints, without further risks for unwelcome bends in the upper eaves purlins. From a symbolical perspective, in this solution there was a coherent continuity from the ancient ones, since the inner roof was again in contact with the outer one by sharing the same supporting base. This particular solution was afterwards repeated
unabated in Hărniceşti (1679), Sârbi Josani (c. 1685), Vişeu de Jos (1699) and Sat
Şugătag (1700), indicating a single team of carpenters behind all of them. Despite
these improvements, the churches were planed at a lower scale than in Budeşti
Josani.
In an other model, found in some villages from the Tisa valley, with roots
before the church from Budeşti Josani, one tie beam was accepted across the nave
to strengthen both the vault and the eaves purlins in the middle, as for example in Rona de Jos (c. 1637; 93), Krainykovo (1688) and other later examples. This singular beam was not a simple functional transom altering the perfection of the vault, but an important mark between the sacred and the profane inside the nave. Almost everywhere it was used, it corresponded with the place where the floor was raised for the platform in front of the icon screen. It was probably accepted for that meaning in the first hand. Not surprisingly, it reminds of the tie beam from the rods of the Polish churches, with about the same signification. Similar cross beams
131
Already in Ieud Deal (1611-21; 61) the eaves purlins were drawn with the inner edge over the wall.
92 Corneşti. The raftering and
the vault share the same massive lateral purlins. Scale drawing of the section through the nave facing east: August 1997.
existed in some churches from the Cosău district,132 but only with a symbolical purpose, since most of them were fixed to the walls without penetrating them. Nevertheless, the cross beam in the local churches reminds of the master's girder in the axis of the local houses, also with a double role: a functional and symbolical one. It is notably that, wherever these beams over the rooms appeared in the local architecture in the past, they seem to have been invested with more than we can see.
The catches were sometimes used to secure or to hold up the
eaves purlins. Around the small sanctuary from Corneşti, dated
from the first decade of the 16th century, the eaves purlins are supported only by catches fixed to the walls. In most of the other cases they were used to strengthen the eaves purlins in between the projecting plates.
Many wooden churches preserved their original laths until the recent restoration works (94) and in a few places, where the zeal to replace them hasn’t reached, they still survive. The original covering materials naturally vanished away, and we have to guess from the old lathings and read some historical information to get an idea of how they initially looked like. Fortunately some old covered roofs from a century or two ago have survived in Breb, Budeşti Susani and until recently in Sârbi Susani. In Breb, the shingles were grooved at one side and extremely large, up to 22 cm wide and 94 cm long. In Sârbi Susani they were also grooved, about 12 x 70 cm, and ended with a beak to prevent them from splitting (95). Since the number of nails necessary to fix them was an important economical factor it was only an advantage to cut them so large. For the same reason we find large spaces between the old laths. In the Tisa valley, where the oak forests were dominant, even the shingles were made from the same material. As these roofs appear today, the rafterings were first boarded and then shingled. The shingles were not grooved, but laid side by side and
fixed by iron nails. Their present sizes in Apşa din Jos are about 9
x 40 cm and they are named “scale” (solzi), due to their lower acute profile.
The protocol of the great canonical visitation from 1751 is the first source giving us a general picture of how the churches
were covered in Maramureş. On most of them the roofs were by
that time shingled, only five were still found thatched.133 None of
the thatched roofs were satisfactory, and it was probably no longer accepted such a cheap material on a house of worship. However, their survival in the middle of the 18th century suggests the number of thatched churches could have been greater in the
previous centuries.134 On the other side, the dominance of shingled
roofs at the time of the visitation clearly points out the distinction of the churches among the common thatched dwellings in almost all the villages.
132
Sârbi Susani, Călineşti Căeni, Onceşti and Corneşti.
133
The parish churches from Kalyny, Lypcha, Novoselytsia (Verkhovyna), Pryborzhavske (former Zadnoe) and Remeţi were thatched. The first four in: Hadzhega 1922, 183, 196, 202 and 209; the last one in: DAZO, 151, 839/1745, 9v.
134
As late as 1724, the remaining part of an old monastery church in Horinchovo (Monastyrets), burned by the Tatars in 1717, was covered by thatch. MOL, C 99, XI.A, Maramoros 1774, 95v.
93 Rona de Jos. The cross beam penetrates the
interior under the spring of the vault in between the two upper pairs of windows. Photo: October 1997.