| Abstract [eng] |
In the Middle Ages, characterised by the development of cities and the spread of the urbanisation process, the practice of warming interior spaces by means of tile stoves formed, and it basically changed the quality of human life. For the cold season, it offered a technologically more advanced, much more economical, and significantly safer home warming method used up to the present day. The success of the innovation and the scale of its spread is witnessed by the extensive geography of the findspots of medieval and modern stove tiles, covering cities of Western, Central, Eastern, and Northern Europe and including Klaipėda in the southeastern Baltic region. Therefore, stove tile researchers in a number of European cities became interested in when the tradition born in the alpine region reached their cities and how it manifested itself in the local conditions. On the other hand, the structural, stylistic, and decorative similarity of stove tiles observed in various European regions witnessed the openness of the stove tile manufacturing field and its sensitivity to the relevant issues of the period and to cultural communication. Similarities in the material culture was an important mark which had affected a number of European cultures and which, from the mental point of view, united even geographically distant populations. The tile stove, beside its utilitarian function, acquired a form of an information medium and of cultural expression. |
