Miskolc is known as a post-industrial town. Apart from the blocks of flats buildings on the sides of the main streets, it is a town mostly formed by districts of houses which, in fact, are carrying a rural-type identity, from more or less fancy ones to those inhabited by middle- and the low-class families. Firewood burning is an alternative method of warming. But with the forest management and wood stocking becoming more and more a private business, this forces the question: for how long?
Acting as a key aspect of rural life, the firewood cutting practice finds itself nowadays at the crossroads of historical imagery of man’s careness for family welfare, and a possible symbol of rural resistance against urbanization, escaped savagery, or poverty. It wouldn’t be wrong to presume that the firewood cutter is not far to become (unless it didn’t unofficially become already) a character to follow the state of the factory worker, or the miner, in this sense completing the list of characters that changed the public perception towards them as from a person engaged in a profession involving physical activity, to one of social and/or political activism. Sharp controversies upon turning forestry and wood production into a private business and therefore reducing public access to free collecting of savage wood drives debates, while general demand for firewood continues to increase.
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Free tutorial on how to use a steam-powered log splitter offered by the workers of the main Miskolc firewood market:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxEyjYW91ms
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