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Dr. Anikó Gazda

Dr Anikó Mária Gazda (11th August, 1933 -10th September, 1990), architect, majored in urban development at the University of Technology and Engineering.After graduating she worked for the construction company of the second district in Budapest, and was then transferred to the Nógrád County Planning Office. She left the office in 1961 and set out for a short professional trip to Rome and Tel Aviv. After returning to Hungary she took up a new post at LAKOTERV (the Residential Building Design Office). From 1963 she worked for VATI (Urban Designing/Development and Research Institute), where she stayed until her death.  At the IV Műemléki és Építéstervezési Iroda (National Heritage Conservation and Design Office) she and her colleagues conducted research into architectural (especially folk architectural) monuments which were not listed as national heritage buildings but could be considered as landmarks in the sense that they played an important part in the architecture of the locality. In 1980[i] she was commissioned to undertake an architectural evaluation of all Hungarian settlements. Within this project Anikó Gazda visited every single settlement in Hungary, collected records on site, chose, photographed and documented buildings which were characteristically traditional and as such were worth listing. Her hierarchy of values was based on her own personal considerations, and her main objective was to map up the structure of each inhabited area, or rather the ways in which the structure had developed. Wherever she went she took photos of  streets, clusters of buildings, village and town centers, market places and department stores and compared them with an earlier state. This was how she traced the parts of the settlements once inhabited by Jews.[ii]  She tried to define the characteristics of certain settlements and regions; in her search for recurrent motifs she photographed entrances, gates, stone crosses on riverbanks, roadside memorials, rows of cellars and Jewish relics. Her  attention was attracted not only by man-made values but also by those found in nature, for example sand drifts and rare species. And last but not least she was deeply interested in the people who inhabited the settlements that she visited. She was convinced that the hidden structure of the built environment cannot be revealed without the stories and histories of the different local ethnic and religious groups. So, whenever she could, she took pictures of the people while they were engrossed in their work and shaped her research following the thread of their stories.[iii] By 1987 her arduous mission was successfully completed.Most of the documents she accumulated during these seven years were never published. The one exemption is the Jewish documents, which were finally published with the support of OTKA (General Hungarian Research Program), not with that of VATI.  The last, painful years of her life were focused around this part of her research - she extended and deepened it as far as she could under the circumstances.Today she is mostly known for her synagogue research because she published more extensively in this field. Her first studies came out in VATI's professional journal, Településfejlesztés (Urban Development) in 1986 and 1987[iv]. These studies later became individual chapters of her book, Synagogues in Hungary, which was edited by László Gerő[v] and published in 1989. The strictly professional data and documentation were published in her posthumous volume Synagogues and Jewish communities in Hungary - maps, sketches, data (published by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences Judaism Research Group)[vi]. This book includes archival data on the entire territory of “Historical Hungary" and it is evident that she always meant to extend her research to the whole area.[vii] However, she could not even process the materials she collected at Munkacs, Huszt and Ungvar, the fewe  locations outside Hungary that she managed to completely cover. After her premature death some of her photos (duplicates of negatives and enlargements), among them the synagogue photos, were transferred to the photo archive of KÖH (the Ministry of Cultural Heritage) under the terms of the author's will. However, copies of the photos deposited with KÖH remained in the possession of VATI. [i] Anikó Gazda carried out research into the settlement structure of the six towns of County Hajdu where the Heyducks settled in the 17th century. She prepared urban development plans for these towns. In the 1960s and 1970 she worked on national heritage conservation and restoration projects [ii] in order to compare the then current state with the earlier one she used old maps and the picture postcard collections of the Herman Ottó Museum in Miskolc and the Zemplén Museum in Szerencs [iii] She published extensively on her considerations and ideas in Kulturális értékek, építészeti hagyományok falvainkban (Cultural values, architectural traditions in our villages...VATI)  [iv] "Magyarország zsinagógái" 1986/2, 109 - 130; "Magyarország zsinagógái" 1986/4, (I-Az Alföld déli része) 113-144;  "Az Alföld zsinagógái" 1987/1, (Az Alföld zsinagógái, második rész), 63 - 83; Magyarország zsinagógái (Borsod-Abauj-Zemplén megye, Szabolcs-Szatmár megye zsinagógái), 1987/2, 117 - 146;  "A Dunántúl zsinagógái" 1987/3 (IV. rész) 89 - 117: In: Településfejlesztés, szerk.: Dr. Kőszegfalvi Gy., VÁTI [v] Magyarországi zsinagógák, Bp., Műszaki Könyvkiadó, 1989 [vi] Zsinagógák és zsidó közösségek Magyarországon - térképek, rajzok, adatok (MTA Judaisztikai Kutatócsoport, Budapest, 1991) [vii] She also conducted research in Burgenland and on the territory of the former Szatmar County. In her research in Szabadka and the Southern Counties she was helped by architect Rudolf Klein

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