False friend

Postage stamps are often associated with surprising stories. A more surprising story than the following one, however, you won’t read today, as they say in the tabloids. The following object showed up today on an auction site:

“Postage stamp labeled Poštovní úřad Ilnice in Czech and Serbian, from the Albanian settlement of Ilnice / ca 1910 Albania, Ilnice, Czech postal station seal maker 36 mm”

Truly it must have been a historic moment, the culmination of the multiculturalism of “the happy times of peace,” when the first post office opened in the Albanian mountain town of Ilnicë, among the picturesque mountains of the Balkans, not far from today’s Macedonian border. And what a post office! With a bilingual, Czech and Serbian stamp, and with the two-tailed lion instead of the two-headed Austrian imperial or Albanian royal eagles. All this in 1910, four years before the Great War, and eight years before the great Central European border shifts. What harmony of the Central European nations! Oh, if it had just stayed this way!


But it has not. And perhaps it never was this way. After all, what is the source of this localization? The fact is, that if we search for “Ilnice”, Google points to the Albanian town. There is no other result. If, however, we use a minimum of common sense, we then think about where and when they used Czech and Cyrillic official labels simultaneously under the auspices of the two-tailed lion, and we realize that it could be only in the diametrically opposite corner of the former Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, in Rusinsko, annexed from Hungary to Czechoslovakia in 1920. And then it is already easy to find, not far from Nagyszőlős/Vinogradov, along the Ilnitska stream, the village of Ilonca (in Czech Ilnice, in Rusyn Ильниця, in Romanian Ilniţa, by the modern Ukrainian official name Ільниця), of which no historical names, like those on the stamp, are known by Google.

In linguistics, a “faux-ami”, false friend is a word that sounds similar in two languages, but has a different meaning in each. Such as Czech Ilnice and Albanian Ilnicë. The above auction description also points out that, without due care and criticism of the sources, Google also may be your false friend.

We could find no contemporary postcard from Ilonca. This is from the neighboring Ilosva, which lay closer to the main road and he railway, and so could be counted on for more postcard customers. After all, it is still closer to Ilonca than the Albanian Ilnicë.

El amigo falso

Los sellos de correos van generalmente unidos a historias curiosas. Y una bastante sorprendente es la que os contamos ahora. Ved el objeto que se mostraba hoy mismo en una casa de subastas:

«Sello de correos con la leyenda Poštovní úřad Ilnice en checo y serbio, del asentamiento albanés de Ilnice / ca. 1910. Albania, Ilnice, Tampón del servicio de correos checo 36 mm.»

En verdad tuvo que ser un momento histórico, la culminación del multiculturalismo de los «felices tiempos de paz», cuando se inauguró la primera oficina de correos en la montañosa ciudad albanesa de Ilnicë, entre las pintorescas montañas de los Balcanes, no lejos de la actual frontera con Macedonia. ¡Y vaya oficina de correos! Con un sello bilingüe, checo y serbio, y con el león de dos colas en lugar de las águilas bicéfalas del imperio austriaco o las águilas albanesas reales. Todo esto en 1910, cuatro años antes de la Gran Guerra y ocho años antes de que cambiara la larga frontera de Europa Central. ¡Qué armonía entre las naciones de aquella Centroeuropa! ¡Ay, si hubiera permanecido así!


Pero no lo hizo. Y tal vez nunca fue así. Después de todo, ¿cuál es la fuente real de esta ubicación? El hecho cierto es que si buscamos «Ilnice», Google apunta a la ciudad albanesa. No nos da más resultados. Sin embargo, si utilizamos un mínimo de sentido común y pensamos dónde y cuándo se utilizarían simultáneamente esos estampillados oficiales checos y cirílicos bajo los auspicios del león de dos colas, nos percataremos de que solo podría ser en un rincón diametralmente opuesto de la antigua monarquía austro-húngara: en Rusinsko, anexada de Hungría a Checoslovaquia en 1920. Y entonces ya nos será fácil encontrar, no lejos de Nagyszőlős/Vinogradov, siguiendo la corriente del Ilnitska, el pueblo de Ilonca (en checo, Ilnice, en rusino Ильниця, en rumano Ilniţa, y en su moderno nombre oficial ucraniano Ільниця), del cual ni un solo nombre histórico, como los del sello, es conocido por Google.

En lingüística, un «faux-ami», falso amigo, es una palabra que suena similar en dos idiomas pero tiene un significado diferente en ambos. Así ocurre con el checo Ilnice y el albanés Ilnicë. De la descripción de la subasta anterior también aprendemos que, sin el debido cuidado y visión crítica de las fuentes, Google también puede ser tu falso amigo.

No hemos podido encontrar ni una sola postal contemporánea de Ilonca. Esta que colocamos aquí es de la vecina Ilosva, ciudad más próxima a la carretera principal y al ferrocarril, razón por la cual debía contar con más clientes de correos. Nos vale. Después de todo, está más cerca de Ilonca que la albanesa Ilnicë.

One year in Subcarpathia

On 17 January, when the Subcarpathian photos of László Végh were published in Magyar Nemzet, I shared them on the Facebook of río Wang. Now, in preparation for our late April Galician tour, I saw them again, and I thought I’d also share them on the blog. So that they can be seen by more people, and not only in Hungarian.

Olena moved several decades ago from Moscow to Kőrösmező/Yasinya

“Thanks to the József Pécsi Scholarship of Photography, the photo reporter of Magyar Nemzet has repeatedly visited Subcarpathia. He met with soldiers returning from the battlefields, families mourning for their relatives, Tatar refugees from the Crimea. And with extraordinary hospitality.

One does not start a major photo report without preparation, so I also started to inquire on the subject before going to Subcarpathia. First, I contacted a local journalist, who accompanied me to several places, introduced me to a number of persons, and, when necessary, translated for me. He was my fixer, as those persons with a local knowledge are known in the journalist jargon, who, in the course of a major field work, guide and assist foreign journalists and photographers.

The first time I went there was March. I clearly remember the day. I went to Verbőc/Verbovec, to the funeral of a soldier fallen in the Eastern Ukrainian conflict. After three hundred and sixteen kilometers I arrived at the border. Passport. Documents. Control. Arrival in Subcarpathia. Bad roads. The imprints of the past, everywhere. Grayness. Pouring rain. And, on the way out of Bereszász/Beregovo, police fines. Not little ones. Nearly an hour of delay. Exhausted, I returned to my quarters.

Funeral of Viktor Márkusz. He served at the 128 Mountain Infantry Brigade

However much I tried, the first few times I could not find the local rhythm. Then I was presented to more and more people who helped me. For example, Aunt Slava, whose son is a 22-year-old soldier on contract. She is in permanent contact with the Subcarpathian soldiers at the front, she knew the answers to all my questions, and helped me in everything. Otherwise, she teaches Ukrainian language in the Hungarian class of a bilingual school.

And quite often I had good luck. For example, in Kőrösmező/Yasinya, where I accidentally set out in the wrong direction to the mountains, this is how I stumbled upon Olena, who moved from Russia to Subcarpathia. Or when one evening, on the way to our lodgings, we caught sight of a flickering candle in a neighboring window. Our host, a Hungarian family, told me that an old lady lived there, Mária András, who prays every morning and evening like this. We managed to get in to visit her, and she allowed me to take some photos of her while praying. Or Uncle Frédi in Fancsika/Fanchykovo, who heard about my wandering about in Subcarpathia and shooting people’s everyday life. He told a friend of his in the village that he’d be happy to show me his doves.


And there were the Hungarian families who lost their loved ones in the war. I spent hours with them. On many occasions I did not even take my camera out, we just talked. On 16 September, Sándor Lőrinc was buried in Fancsika. When I heard about the funeral, I got into the car, and went to see the family the previous evening. I introduced myself, I told them who I was, where I came from, what I was after. I talked a lot to Sándor’s mother, Aunt Anna. I was also allowed to be present at the all-night vigil in a small room of the small house, at the coffin covered with the Ukrainian flag. The next day, at the funeral, there were many people, all the inhabitants of the village. And many Ukrainian soldiers, whom I had met in Verbőc in March. They approached me, and said they hope to meet us next time at some more cheerful event.

After the funeral I wanted to return to Budapest. However, Aunt Anna told me I cannot go before having dinner with them. I made excuses, but she would not let me go. They even packaged donuts for the road. Budapest is far away, it will be fine.

Fancsika/Fanchikovo. Funeral of the Hungarian soldier Sándor Lőrinc, fallen in the Eastern Ukrainian conflict

Wherever I went during this time in Subcarpathia, I encountered a friendly welcome. And not only with Hungarian families. I also visited Tatar families who had fled from the Crimea, and with whom we talked through a computer translation program. The kids really enjoyed it that sometimes we did not understand each other, and we explained ourselves by gestures. Activity. I had visited soldiers, volunteers, who collected food and clothes for the Subcarpathian soldiers on the battlefields. In Aknaszlatina/Solotvino, among the ruins of the old salt mine, we stumbled upon Uncle Yura, who had worked there, and is now a night watchman in the mine area. We also met Uncle Béla, in whose garden there is a huge “crater”, because the ground had collapsed above a former mine.

The number of Hungarians in Subcarpathia has been drastically reduced. In the census of 2001, about a hundred and fifty thousand declared themselves as Hungarians. There are many mixed marriages in which the children no longer speak Hungarian. In the bleak economic situation, only those who are able try to find work abroad. It is much harder who decide to stay. They live on little money from day to day, but they believe that it is not hopeless to stay, and that they will have a future in their homeland. Which, by the whims of history, has changed hands five times in the last hundred years.”

Farewell to Yasinya

In the past months, for this or that reason, we returned again and again to Kőrösmező/Yasinya, the “German-Russian village” lying at the source of the Tisa river, under the Tatar pass leading to Galicia. First we shared the discoveries of our tour last summer, then we remembered those who “lost their lives in an immigration procedure”, or climbed up, guided by the one-time traveler Sándor Török, to the Polish border, and then we got in a train with him at the border station. In yesterday’s post, looking around from the hill of the Strukovska church, and deciphering the strange message-in-a-bottle of a hundred-year-old postcard, we had a glimpse into the troubled fate of this region. Now, having told all we could tell about it, we leave Kőrösmező for a while, at least until we can lead a tour again to the source of the Black Tisa. We say farewell to it with the melancholic pictures of the Czech photo blog ajedna, which, just like the writings of Ivan Olbracht, beautifully attest to the amount of love and nostalgia for this region in the remembrance of also another people.


Dunaio, Dunaio, Rusyn folk song, recorded in 2010

Referendum

When I first glimpsed them, peering out through the dirty window glass of the no. 5 tram as it scraped its way along the embankment of the Vltava, I had trouble making sense of them. Were they really a series of propaganda posters agitating for the Czech annexation of Subcarpathia? Were they really prominently displayed in the stone frames that, before 1989, displayed Communist propaganda to the travelers along one of Prague’s busiest thoroughfares?

I blinked, twice. Yes, it seemed to be true.

Is this evidence of some latent thread of Czech hope, a nostalgic longing for a mythic Slavic past, a yearning for reunification with Československo’s lost little brother, Podkarpatská Rus? Emboldened, perhaps, by Putin’s recent swallowing in a single bite the whole of Crimea, were there Czech irredentists on the march?

The whole thing struck me as maybe satirical, so I went to the internet to find out more. It is true that, prior to 1989, the six stone frames built into the wall that separates Letná hill from the embankments named after Edvard Beneš and Kapitán Otakar Jaroš, were used for socialist propaganda. After the change of regime, they fell into disuse. In 2005, they were again put to use as an outdoor public art gallery named Artwall.

The current exhibition, Verchovina, is by a group of Slovak artists, known as Kassaboys, who hail from Košice (Kassa in Hungarian). The posters act as the ephemera from a fictitious referendum to reunite Czechoslovakia, including Subcarpathia, which was an integral part of the republic in the interwar period 1918-1938. The artists themselves state that the work is a reaction to current events in Ukraine, where an implicitly fictitious referendum in real life has brought Crimea back under Russian rule. And their choice of the series of words: integration, connection, affiliation, annexation serves as a commentary on a possible future for Podkarpatská Rus (and, pars pro toto, of the whole of Ukraine) with regard to the EU.

The original posters show that they were composed by adding the red slogans on the illustrations of a German-language travel brochure of Subcarpathia from the 1930s

You can find out more at the Artwall web site (in Slovak) and in this article of the Aktualně.cz site (in Czech).