Excavation in the Museum’s Deposits. Early Modern Objects Discovered by Béla Pósta in 1904 in the Calvinist Church of Tirimia (Mureș County)

Abstract

This article tries to present the story of the archaeological excavation carried out by Béla Pósta in the Calvinist church of Tirimia (Hung. Nagyteremi, Germ. Gross‑Wachsdorf, Mureș County) in 1904 and to analyze the objects discovered on that occasion, preserved today in the patrimony of the National Museum of Transylvanian History in Cluj‑Napoca. Reconstructing an excavation carried out almost 120 years ago, when the archaeology of medieval and early modern churches was in its infancy, based exclusively on objects kept in museum repositories and on letters/diaries of the period, is a difficult task. From the correspondence between Béla Pósta and the people directly or indirectly involved (the Calvinist priest of the village of Tirimia, Márton Kakasy; the local landowner Baron László Solymosy, etc.) and from the personal diaries of Lajos Kelemen we can partially reconstruct the archaeological excavations, the scandal that followed, and later the fate of the objects discovered during the research.