Williamsburg of Hungary

 

Diorama of Opusztaszer National Heritage Park

Last Friday, I went on a field trip to Opusztaszer, a national heritage park in Hungary. In the rotunda, they had a diorama of the entire park. You can see that it has a bit more green space than Williamsburg, Virginia and maybe not as many buildings to explore.  There are two farm houses, a fisherman's house, a rural school house, offices, a forester's house, and late 19th century shops and offices. The fisherman houses and farmhouses had the same three-room floor plan as the traditional house that we toured a couple of weeks ago. 

Flood Sculpture by Tisza River
Opusztazer has two things that Williamsburg does not have: a cyclorama and  an exhibit about flooding.  The exhibit is in the house where the one who is responsible for managing the flood gates lives. The first recorded flood was when the dam broke on March 12, 1879 after a week of rising waters and strong winds. The water was thirty-two feet over flood stage and submerged Szeged for more than two months, destroying everything except the church, which was first built as a hospital in the thirteenth century. There have been two floods since then, each progressively deeper, but they did not damage the buildings like the 1879 flood. The most recent flood, in April 2006, was thirty-three feet over flood stage. A modern sculpture commemorates this flood.

The cyclorama is in the top of the rotunda, but no photos are allowed. You can get a glimpse of it at this website:  https://www.hungarianconservative.com/articles/culture_society/great-hungarian-artworks-the-feszty-cyclorama/ The photograph does not adequately capture the whole painting or the arrangement of clay and brass pots, altars, and sculptures that blend into the painting.

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