A legintelligensebb magyar falu: Porvár!
Porvár, the most intelligent village in Hungary

Summary/Abstract: The paper describes the beginnings of the first suburban estate of family houses with gardens in Budapest. Building one-family houses was a new phenomenon not only in Hungary but on the whole continent in the 1880s, and the “Tisztviselôtelep” [‘civil servants’ housing estate’] was an early manifestation of this new idea. The special feature of the project was that unlike in other cities, such as the Wiener Cottage Verein program, the instigators were not members of the richest circles, but came from middle class state employees (railway personnel, post office workers, teachers). The paper discusses in detail the social composition of the population of the housing estate on the basis of the annual registers of civil servants and Budapest address lists. The new initiative was not the result of the ideals of the new middle class way of life, which had reached the Continent from England in several waves in the last third of the 19th century, but rather a spontaneous response to the disadvantages of great city life and the housing shortage then common in Budapest. Thus it can be regarded as one of the first manifestations of the ideals of Hungarian middle class way of life. Also, the building of the housing estate was made possible by the fact that various benefits of city life, such as draining, street lighting, etc., were available in the peripheries as well. The inhabitants of “Tisztviselôtelep” wished to enjoy the benefits of both rural and city life. The paper uses literary sources to scrutinize the social relationships among the inhabitants of the estate.

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