Poemas del río Wang: Hungary preserved

7.34. The Pest end of the Liberty Bridge, the Market Hall and the Karl Marx University of Economy seen from the Gellért Hill lookout

Quite some time now, we have written about the Black Ethnographer, who with great devotion searches through the houses of Moscow waiting for demolition and the abandoned villages of Russia, and saves whatever those moving out did not deem worthy to take with themselves: first of all, ten thousands of old family photos. The Hungarian version of our post bore the title “Fortepan in Kostroma”, with a hint to the highly popular Fortepan project, which does the same job in Hungary. Indeed, both collections are built up with objects found, and both play an important role in filling the hiatuses of collective memory. The Ethnographer’s recent posts, however, pull the relationship even closer. The large family photo album he found in an evacuated flat of Western Moscow’s Kuntsevo estate, also includes several Hungarian pictures from the 1950s and 60s. They show a Soviet army officer’s family, who apparently traveled a lot from the Crimea and Odessa through the village of the grandmother and Lwów as far as Prague, but some photos – a few Russian ones, perhaps some from Lwów, and those from Hungary certainly – suggest that the head of the family (and perhaps also other relatives/friends) did their military service in these places.

We have checked the hitherto uploaded seven parts, and sorted out the pictures – about fifty, one-seventh of the complete set – which surely or perhaps represent sites in Hungary. Here we publish them both in the form of large images and mosaic pieces. The number under each picture refers to the number of the respective part (see below) and the respective number within it. I urge our readers, who always willingly joined an invitation for a play, to review first these pictures and identify the sites represented in them, not sparing the eventual historical or emotive details. Obviously the Hungarian readers have a great advantage in this, but we will immediately add all information in the captions, so that you – and obviously the original author – can check them. And then look through the original photo series. Firstly, whether there are any additional Hungarian photos which escaped my attention. And on the other hand, because from these many fragments, sites, life scenes, beautiful or scary faces such a world and such lives emerge, whose knowledge – although they lived here among us, and moreover partly still live here – was absolutely impossible to most of us.