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Rest of World » Early Carved Doorway with Roof
Ref: 1904
One of the remarkable sights seen by early 20th century Western travellers and photographers in the eastern parts of the old Austrian Empire were the carved gateways to farmsteads in the villages of Transylvania.
This gateway originating from an abandoned farm in the eastern Carpathians is made of huge timbers of oak, it has early looking abstract and geometric chip carving that is normally found on old Romanian folk art and of a distinctly pre-AD feel (not in respect of manufacture but of symbolic origins). There is also some later carving of initials and a mid-20th century date suggesting this farmstead was Szekeler, an old Hungarian tribe, or perhaps the home came into the possession of a Szekeler family and was made by an earlier peoples living there. The door itself hangs by iron hinges and opens, whilst the whole thing is roofed. With the roof we also have a set of original terracotta tiles.
In this part of Europe especially before the region became part of Romania in 1920, there were many different ethnic groups and the eastern most parts traditionally bordered onto the empires of the eastern “barbaroi”, the Mongolians in the 13th century, for example, or the Ottomans in the 19th. These traditional gateways have the atmosphere therefore of much earlier domestic structures in the West like Stokesay castle on the Welsh borders but they are also like gates of merchants houses in Indian cities from more recent times. Their purpose was both defensive and magical, the doors opened into courtyard farm dwellings and the symbols transcribed framing the door protected in not only a physical sense against intruders, strangers, wolves, vampires and other malign spirits of which in this culturally layered and richly historical region of old Europe there were many. If one could only find some spot to house such a rare item who could ever wish to part with it?
Transylvania 18th - 19th cent.
H: 256cm (100.8in)
W: 172cm (67.7in)
D: 38cm (15.0in)
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