A kácsi bencés apátság román kori kőfaragványai
Authors: Havasi Krisztina 
Published: March 2018

The Benedictine abbey of Kács dedicated to St Peter was – as historical and archaeological sources suggest – in place of and around the current parish church on top of the hill in the northern part of the village, once the central lands of the Örsúr clan in the 12–13th century. The founders and advowees of the monastery were probably members of the Örsúr clan, who also built a castle on the edge of the village and in nearby Sály. The more exact foundation date of the Benedictine abbey is unknown. Its first mention „monasterium de Kach” is in a diploma of 1248 summarizing the royal land grants to the bishop of Eger. Its title and religious order –„abbas monasterii Sancti Petri de Kach de ordine Sancti Benedicti” – are known from a source of 1292. After 1347 the monastery came to be possessed by a branch of clan named after Tibold and living in nearby Darócz. After the mid-14th century, practically contemporaneously with the breaking up of the clan into branches and the local segmentation of the clan estates, as well as the impoverishment of the monastery, the abbey seems to disappear from the sources. Its demolition in 1549 was before the appearance of the Ottomans around Eger. In place of the ruins a single-nave baroque church was built in the 1720s, which became the parish church of the re-peopled village in the 18th century. In 1882 the western part of the church was enlarged and a tower built in revival romanesque style. The remains were first taken note of in the 1860s by Arnold Ipolyi (1823–1886), the canon of Eger and a researcher of architectural relics of the Árpád Age around Eger. He thought to have found remains of the medieval monastic church in the small baroque church with semi-circular apse. He described several ornamental romanesque stone carvings made from “red stone” (andesite tuff) on the site. Further medieval carvings were found during the extension of the church on the west in 1882, which went to canon Gyula Bartalos’s (1839–1923) collection. Later he gave away these fragments and thus founded the Lapidary of the archiepiscopal Liceum of Eger. In the 1960s excavations were carried on around the parish church of Kács; its archeologist (Károly Kozák) presumed (on the basis of a much-disputed theory) that the floor-plan of the singlenave church with the rounded apse suggests 11th century origin. At the same time, along the south side of the church a narrower nave section terminated also by a semi-circular apse was unearthed, which might rather suggest a 12–13th century three-aisle layout. To the south of this remain, vestiges of a north-south oriented wing were recovered, which can be identified with the Benedictine monastery building with great probability. The paper reviews the romanesque stone carvings found in Kács (which are partly in museums, partly on the spot and some regrettably lost since the 1960s), our art historical knowledge and collection historical data about them.

The group of romanesque carved stone relics display stylistic homogeneity. More exact dating within the 12–13th century is hindered by the fragmentary nature and provincial features of the group. Local analogies of the stylistic features, motifs, moulding shapes can be discerned, among other places, in Szomolya, Boldva, Tarnaszentmária and the local stratum of the workshop of Eger cathedral around 1200. On these bases, the studied ensemble is datable to the last third of the 12th century or the beginning of the 13th. The romanesque fragments of Kács inform us of the cultural level and possibilities of a clan who were mainly locally important even in their heyday in the 12–13th centuries as the modest building of their small Benedictine monastery reveals. That is what lends it its significance, too, for in the regional context it is a little known architectural relic of a well-delimited area hallmarked by extant relics of the Árpád Age such as Feldebrő and Tarnaszentmária, the remains of the Benedictine abbey at Boldva and the Cistercian abbey at Bélapátfalva, or the one-time „chef de’oeuvre” of the 12th century, the cathedral of Eger in the centre of the region, rebuilt around 1200.