Velemér ‘Sindü’

Author: Bulcsu László
Photos: Nagymarosi Ádám

Among recent acquisitions at the Museum of Ethnography are several hand-crafted roof tiles from the Őrség village of Velemér.  Collected partly through a generous donation, and partly from subsequent ethnographic field work, these tiles—or sindü—represent a largely overlooked object type that poses a number of questions for researchers.

The word ‘sindü’ is a variant on ‘zsindely,’ (shingle), from the German ‘Schindel’.  In the north and west of Hungary, it is one of several related dialect words for ‘roof tile,’ a term whose literal Hungarian equivalent Velemér natives do not use.  In both Velemér, and the neighbouring villages of Gödörháza and Magyarszombatfa, sindü gradually replaced thatching, the material that had enjoyed general use until around the turn of the 20th century (wooden shingles were a great rarity). In Velemér, production of the tiles persisted until the time of the Second World War, when factory-made variants first came to prominence.  Today, there are few left to discover, and those that have survived have generally been repurposed to cover outbuildings:  typically, when a sindü roof was replaced, the tiles were discarded, sold, or stacked somewhere, making them easy to acquire—a fact not lost on sindü collector Géza Varga, whose own tiles now form the core collection of the Velemér Sindü Museum.

Typically, sindü were crafted in a rectangular or beaver-tail shape.  Though most are unadorned, many are in fact decorated with raised or recessed motifs or symbols.  Interestingly, the relief designs—botanical motifs, monograms, dates—are found on the underside.  The reason for this relates to production technique:   the moulds used for shaping were not only carved at the lug, or handle of the shingle, but also had the negative of the decoration engraved into them.  The use of moulds implies serial production:  even the more decorative of them were used multiple times, as seen from surviving tiles with identical patterns.  A more custom solution involved ‘tracing’ the desired motifs into sand sprinkled into the moulds to ease tile removal.  Recessed designs were chiselled in post-manufacture and were therefore not only rarer and more distinct, but could also be found on either side of the finished product.  The másfeles sindü or ‘tile-and-a-half’ displayed here had its own specific use.  Made in a unique mould, it served to replace the final whole and adjacent half tile at a row’s end.

One might ask:  what does the field of ethnography have to gain from this seemingly unremarkable object that even its place of origin has all but forgotten?  Research into related topics—the origins of the technology, the way the clay was worked, the identities and ambitions of makers, their clientele, the relationship between the craft and regional ceramic tradition, the meanings of various motifs—is ongoing. When found, the answers to these questions can lead to a better understanding of not only the tiles themselves, but also the intricate social networks that sustained them.