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Budapest, Fire service museum
The reconstruction of the water organ in Aquincum from Roman times (A.D. 228) In the course of our work, we took into consideration the materials determined by laboratory examinations of the findings. As a result, we made the different components from those materials that had been used c. 1770-1800 years ago. We believed it to be important to use antique forms and techniques with relation to the pipes and other parts. For this reason we had to disregard technologies used in modern organ-building practice. We reconstructed the water organ according to old descriptions, drawings and laws of physics. The wood parts and the ornaments were fixed to each other with small hand-wrought bronze nails. The length of the missing or incomplete pipes was calculated on the basis of old Roman measurements.
Egyptian terracotta During the work, we encountered hundreds of questions, both musical and technical. While the answers to these probably only exist in infinity, we believe that our reconstruction reflects the ancient musical instrument in the most realistic manner possible. The History of the Organ In District III of Budapest, south of the Aquincum Museum, as workers were excavating the foundation for a transformer building for the Electric Works, they came across a caved-in Roman-era cellar among the ruins of an ancient firehouse. Under the stones and rubble they found some broken pipes and parts of an organ. These famous relics were excavated in 1931 by Lajos Nagy, then archeologist of the Aquincum Museum.
The plaque on the organ (Translation: Gaius Iulius Viatorinus, consul of the colonia-ranked city of Aquincum and former aedilis (a kind of police chief), from his own pocket endows the organ of the firefighters' command (praefectus collegii centonarium) to said organization in the time of the consulate of Modestus and Probus (228 AD). They also found a plaque commemorating the fact of gift-giving, the texts of which indicate that the musical instrument was bestowed to the Aquincum firefighters' command by Gaius Iulius Viatorinus in 228 AD. The organ in the cellar of the firehouse may have been used by the firefighters; it probably fell into the cellar during an enemy siege ca. 250, when the firehouse itself was burned to the ground. The wood and leather parts of the organ were destroyed by the fire, and the heat caused the metal parts to fuse together. Since the cellar was not cleaned out after the fire, the organ parts remained buried there; despite their less than optimal condition, the relics have made it possible to form a clearer picture of organs from the Roman-era.
Remains of the organ Lajos Nagy believes the relics of the organ were found in a position that corresponds to its original condition, and since it fell over backwards, the part on top probably originally faced the listeners. This may be why the archeologist found the above mentioned endowment plaque affixed to the front of the organ. The more intact pieces of the original parts were put on display in the Aquincum Museum after immediately being cleaned, while the smaller fragments were put in a crate to await their fate. The First Reconstruction of the Organ In 1935, following designs by Lajos Nagy and János Kalmár, and based on the size and probable positioning of the parts and pipes found, the Angster organ factory of Pécs prepared a reconstruction of the portable organ, which was powered by two small leather airbags reminiscent of a blacksmith's bellows. In the autumn of 1959, Viktor Ráfael, the reconstructor for the Aquincum Museum, reassembled the original parts, using both the displayed parts which had survived bombings during the war and the fragments from the rubble, which had been moved in 1944 to the cellars of the Basilica for safety. Like his predecessors, Viktor Ráfael did not reconstruct the water organ out of the only Roman-era original organ parts, but patterned it along the lines of the Angster reconstruction instead. Ráfael also prepared a non-functioning model organ in 1956 as the first standing exhibit of the Firehouse Museum. The Second Reconstruction In 1969 Werner Walcker-Mayer, a master organ maker from Ludwigsburg, prepared a new reconstruction, and in 1970 published a detailed study of it. Although he lists arguments in favor of the water organ theory, his reconstruction was not a water organ. In the meantime, the Central Department of Museology and Technology performed a newer reconstruction and preservation of the original parts. In the course of this "the fragments which were bent and shrunk by the fire were carefully straightened out. Smaller missing pieces were substituted using appropriate procedures." In 1973, in keeping with modern exhibitional principles, the original parts were assembled on a plastic model frame in the interests of better viewability. The Reconstruction of the Aquincum Roman-era Organ as a Hydraulus (Water Organ) and the Construction of a Working Model of the Bellows János Minárovics, a researcher for the Firehouse Museum, has been dealing intensively since 1987 with proof showing that the Aquincum organ was a water organ.
Organ drawing from 9th-century psalmbook in the Utrecht University Library In water organs, constant air pressure is ensured by an air regulator, or pnigeus (also called a wind-bell or air-kettle). The air is sent by cylindrical or airblown pumps to the pnigeus, which is usually depicted as a bell-shaped air tank.
Structure of the Heron water organ (following Schmidt) There are openings on the lower rim of the pnigeus, or else it is set on holders in a water tank. If air is pumped into the pnigeus, the water level drops inside the air tank and rises outside it. If too much air gets in, then it is released along the rim and bubbles to the surface, so that the air pressure level remains constant. The role of the water is to ensure a continuous flow of air from the pnigeus to the airbox and from there to the pipes. Based on Minárovics's observations, our company in 1996 produced a working reconstruction of the ancient instrument using water bellows.
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