The bourgeois culture of Košice (Kassa) in Upper Hungary and the childhood of János Krcho, spent there in the early 1960s, converged at a fortunate historical moment. Family tradition and taste – shaped outside the bleak uniformity of socialist housing estates – and a Hungarian-language intellectual culture confined largely to the private sphere together set him on a path that consciously embraced the task of preserving and further developing an inherited spiritual legacy. In his adolescence he encountered parish priest Frigyes Pálos of Tereske, almost at the very moment when the latter made an extraordinary discovery during the renovation of his church: the uncovering of a walled-up medieval fresco of Saint Ladislaus. In response to this find, the highly cultivated priest embarked on formal art-historical studies, obtaining his degree in 1972 and becoming one of the leading specialists on the subject; today he serves as director of the Cathedral Treasury and Diocesan Collection in Vác. His professional trajectory exerted a decisive influence on the development of Krcho’s own scholarly career.
Born to intellectual parents and endowed with exceptional draughtsmanship, Krcho initially envisaged a career in graphic design during his adolescence; he ultimately pursued studies in civil engineering, yet design-related questions increasingly came to the fore in his interests. In the first years following graduation, working as a structural engineer in a state planning office in Košice (Kassa), he encountered the field of architectural heritage conservation for the first time. In Slovakia, the systematic scholarly research and conscious protection of historic monuments began relatively late, only in the mid to late 1980s, and even then amid considerable difficulties – particularly in towns of Upper Hungary with a historically Hungarian population, where access to archival documentation was locally impossible, as the relevant materials had remained in Hungarian archives.
In Košice in the early 1980s, design enterprises had little chance of securing substantial commissions. For the most part they were occupied with the planning of prefabricated housing blocks, and considerations such as architectural quality, the relationship between building and setting, or integration into the historic urban fabric scarcely featured among the priorities of the construction sector. Through his colleague Ján Šprlák, a leading Slovak architect, Krcho received his first assignment in the field of heritage survey: for a planned open-air museum he produced a full measured survey and documentation of a traditional Slovak farmstead building with a timber-shingled roof. Traditional architecture increasingly absorbed him; he began to engage with it in earnest and sought opportunities in Hungary for further study. On the essence of architecture he writes: “Architecture is one of humanity’s most ancient activities. I remember admiring it as a teenager, yet thinking that I could never understand its essence. According to Jiří Eduard Hermach, ‘archi-tecture’ is born in the moment of ‘thauma’, somewhere in the Greek poleis of the fifth century, at the same time as ‘philo-sophy’. In its earliest meanings, as ‘archē’ – trunk, principle, origin – and as ‘tiktō’ – to beget, to give birth. In Hungarian, too, ‘architecture’ may have come into being in a similar way, as ‘making-whole’ – ép-ítészet. Perhaps what is most exciting about architecture is that, for millennia, it has always been about the same thing: it changes, yet its essence remains the same. I heard György Jánossy say that because we have never concerned ourselves with function as much as in the twentieth century, the consequence is that one can no longer design plans as one did in the nineteenth. One could continue the thought by saying that, having concerned ourselves so much with historic cities, one can no longer design urban interventions (or at least one ought not to) as in the twentieth century, and so on… In architectural-theory seminars our students are usually outraged by Adolf Loos when he writes that architecture is not art. Yet architecture already existed when ‘art’, as a concept, had not even been born, and it continues to exist today, when the traditional forms of art are being transformed into various electronic enchantments, installations, performances, minimal or conceptual arts.” In other words, for Krcho architecture signifies precisely this: the ground of art, culture, science, past and future.
In Miskolc he met architect István Ferenc, who recognised the potential in the young scholar and recommended the Faculty of Architecture at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics (BME), where Krcho could further develop his knowledge of Upper Hungarian towns within the framework of doctoral research. He was awarded a research scholarship and continued his PhD studies under the supervision of Mihály Zádor. It was at this point that he began the systematic investigation of the topography of Košice and other towns of Upper Hungary, their original plot structures, and the circles of patrons and first owners. Such work constitutes an essential precondition for the preparation of the scholarly documentation underpinning monument conservation and reconstruction; consequently, Krcho’s research findings – only a portion of which has so far been published – are indispensable to the comprehensive exploration of Košice’s history and to the processes of heritage protection and restoration of the city’s architectural fabric.
At the same time, he travelled extensively across the endangered historic monuments of Northern Hungary, focusing in particular on rural churches on the brink of decay. At the university his teachers included such eminent figures as Gyula Hajnóczi, Tamás Guzsik, Zoltán Szentkirályi, Alice Horváth, and Jenő Major – the latter steering his research towards the investigation of Košice’s original plot structure. His studies increasingly aligned with the field of architectural heritage conservation: in 1990 he obtained a specialist qualification in monument conservation engineering, and in 1992 he completed his Candidate of Sciences dissertation. Subsequently, again at the Faculty of Architecture of the Budapest University of Technology, he earned a degree in architectural design in 1998, while also teaching there as a part-time lecturer.
During the years of political transition, alongside his work in Budapest, he assumed an important role in Košice. Between 1992 – 1998 he served as heritage inspector at the Košice regional centre of the Slovak Monuments Board, where he successfully prevented the demolition of a number of urban buildings. From 1999 he taught at the Department of Architecture of the Faculty of Arts at the Technical University of Košice, serving as vice-dean until 2005, and from 2009 as head of the Department of Art History and Theory. In 2004, together with architect Štefan Zahatňanský, he designed the conversion of the university’s attic space, a project that was awarded the CE ZA AR Prize by the Slovak Chamber of Architects in 2005. By reusing the original floor structure and subtly raising the roofline, the intervention reintegrated the Socialist Realist building into its historic context, creating spacious, light-filled studios and a contemporary educational facility.
Krcho organised regular study trips to Upper Hungary for architects from Hungary, with the aim of familiarising them with the architectural values that had survived there. It was on one such journey that he met architect György Szekér, with whom he later collaborated on several monument reconstructions, including that of the church in Beregdaróc. Through their joint work, his attention increasingly turned to the importance of wall investigation as a fundamental component of scholarly architectural surveys.
From the 1990s onwards, a wave of church-building that followed the political transition placed numerous churches in Upper Hungary at risk. In his capacity as heritage inspector, Krcho’s very first decision, in 1992, prevented the demolition of a part of the Reformed church in Šebastovce (Zsebes) – a protected historic monument – for which permission had been granted only shortly beforehand. Later, as a practising designer, he devoted himself primarily to the reconstruction of churches in Upper Hungary, becoming the field’s foremost specialist. He joined the Teleki László Foundation’s programme for the restoration of Hungarian-related historic monuments beyond Hungary’s borders. During the investigation of the church at Veľká Tŕňa (Nagytoronya), he applied for the first time a methodological principle that would become characteristic of his practice: the building was examined simultaneously and in parallel by a conservator-restorer, an archaeologist, and an architect, enabling the team to draw jointly synthesised conclusions across the different areas of expertise. In 2002 he received the Műemlékvédelemért – Forster Gyula-díj (Forster Gyula Prize for Heritage Conservation) for his research and restoration work on the churches at Chym (Hím) and Seňa (Abaújszina). Alongside his research, design, and teaching responsibilities, he also plays a significant role in Slovakia’s architectural press: in addition to presenting the achievements of contemporary Slovak architecture, he regularly writes on major projects in Hungary as well. This multifaceted professional activity is coupled with the sustained promotion of Upper Hungarian monuments and the publication of their values. His lectures, specialist articles, and publications address a particular lacuna in Hungarian-language scholarship: when it comes to the historic monuments of Upper Hungary – their fate, building history, and present condition – Krcho is almost certainly among the most knowledgeable authorities. This exceptional corpus of expertise is fundamental in more than one respect: on the one hand, it provides indispensable background for the exploration of the history of Hungarian towns in Upper Hungary and for a deeper understanding of their civic culture; on the other, it offers expert support to numerous reconstruction processes – and, more broadly, to Hungarian heritage conservation as a whole – especially those that approach the architectural heritage of Northern Hungary’s regions in a complex, integrated manner.
[Written in 2017]