Opening

This is how the main hall of the library – the Cathedral Library of Kalocsa, if someone has not read the previous post – looked some hours before the solemn opening. The glass cases in front of the Baroque bookshelves had been prepared specifically for this exhibition. They exhibit the most precious printed Bibles of the library, while the codices are in the previous hall. On the start page of the “Treasures of Kalocsa” series by Studiolum you can also see the image of the main hall without the glass cases – all right, that image was taken by a professional photographer, not by us.

Detail of the codex exhibition

Before the guests arrive, let us have a look at the stack-rooms of the library, closed from visitors, where we have spent so many intimate hours browsing among the books.





The exhibition is opened by Archbishop Balázs Bábel of Kalocsa and by papal legate Archbishop Juliusz Janusz.

In the right lower corner there is the Erasmus exhibition case displaying two highlights, the monumental ten volumes Leiden edition of Erasmus’s Opera omnia – even today the best complete edition of Erasmus – and an autograph letter by Erasmus. In the previous Luther case one can also read an autograph poem by Luther.

Apotheosis of the librarians

Y en la tierra, paz

Dedicado a Enrique Lázaro

En la Biblioteca de la Catedral de Kalocsa se inaugura mañana una muestra de valor inmenso: la colección de antiguas Biblias recogidas durante siglos por una singular sucesión de arzobispos bibliófilos que residieron allá. Dos preciosos ejemplares medievales iluminados —un Salterio de Bohemia de principios de 1400 y un manuscrito parisino de las cartas de San Pablo de hacia 1250— han sido ya publicados en sendos DVDs por Studiolum.

También hemos participado en la selección de esta muestra, y mientras trajinábamos entre libros nos fue dado descubrir una peculiar Biblia que nadie había registrado aún en el catálogo de la biblioteca.


Este infolio de los Evangelios en eslavo eclesiástico va protegido por una suntuosa encuadernación en metal. Originalmente, las imágenes esmaltadas de Cristo y los Cuatro Evangelistas se insertaban en la cubierta frontal, y las de la Santísima Trinidad en la posterior. Los cuatro soportes o remaches de la tapa posterior revelan que el libro, como es normal en la liturgia ortodoxa, se fijaba al atril del altar para representar así la permanencia de Cristo en su Iglesia hasta el fin de los tiempos.




La introducción del libro enumera los nombres de todos aquellos que contribuyeron económicamente a la preparación —impresión, encuadernación o decoración— de este ejemplar, y subraya que no se trata de una publicación ordinaria, sino de un valioso libro litúrgico producido uno a uno con gran esfuerzo y destinado a ocupar un puesto de honor. La introducción acaba con la fecha de publicación, al Estilo Antiguo de la Iglesia Ortodoxa, informándonos de que el libro se finalizó en Moscú, en la imprenta del Santo Sínodo, en el año 7400 después de la creación del mundo y en el de 1892 tras la encarnación del Verbo, el sexto día de agosto. Fecha y lugar se anotaron también en húngaro, a lápiz, debajo del texto impreso.


Estos Evangelios contienen otras dos notas manuscritas, una en la primera y otra en la última hoja de guarda. Y son justamente estas inscripciones las que convierten el libro en un objeto singular a cuyo alrededor gira una fascinante historia cultural y geográfica.

Recuerdo del Campo de Batalla Ruso
Malec (Distrito Pružany, Gobernación de Grodno, Lituania)
22 de noviembre de 1916.
Ferenc Fischer
Teniente de húsares húngaro

Al leerlo, uno queda molesto por el sacrilegio e imagina a los soldados húngaros expoliando las iglesias ortodoxas de los territorios lituanos ocupados, arramblando con cualquier objeto que pudiera servir como «recuerdo de la guerra». Sin embargo, si atendemos a los hechos podremos contemplar un panorama diferente.


La Gobernación de Grodno (Grodna, Горадня, Гродна, Hrodna, Gardinas, הורדנה, Gorodna, Гродно) se constituyó en 1796 tras la división del histórico reino polaco-lituano de los territorios que tocaron a Rusia, y sus fronteras cambiaron mucho incluso en tiempos zaristas. La ciudad que había pertenecido al gran ducado lituano, y luego al reino polaco, después de la Primera Guerra Mundial regresó a la restablecida Polonia. Desde 1939 pasó a formar parte de la Unión Soviética, aunque también estuvo ocupada por los alemanes entre 1941 y 1944. Desde 1990 pertenece a la Bielorrusia independiente, como la mayor parte de la antigua Gobernación, mientras que otra parte de aquella Gobernación se reparte entre Polonia y Lituania. Así, los más viejos de Grodno podrían decir lo mismo que los de la no tan lejana ciudad húngara de Ungvár (Ужгород), en Ucrania: que han vivido en cinco países distintos sin haber abandonado nunca su ciudad. Por lo menos, quienes hayan logrado superar todos estos terremotos.

La Gobernación de Grodno en el Atlas de Marks (Большой всемирный настольный атласъ Маркса, segunda edición, revisada, 1910, detalle de la Tabla 9)

Malecz (Малеч, Malech, Maliecz, Maletsch, Malch, Maltz, Maltesch, Малечь) fue en su día una ciudad mercado. Hoy queda en el centro de la antigua Gobernación de Grodno, entre lagos y pantanos, a medio camino entre Bialostok, el escenario de El violinista en el tejado, y Pinsk, ciudad natal de Ryszard Kapuściński, sobre la que escribe unas cálidas páginas al principio de su obra El Imperio. El lugar se puede ver al sudeste de la letra «H» de la palabra ГУБЕРНIЯ en esta tabla del gran Atlas de Marks. El compendio estadístico de la Gobernación de Grodno nos informa de que la ciudad estuvo habitada por población polaca, bielorrusa, rusa y judía, coloreada con minorías armenias, alemanas y tártaras, y cada uno con su religión particular, como en toda la Cherta, desde el Báltico al Mar Negro. Una parte del 10-15% de la población judía empezó a emigrar a América desde principios del siglo XX, y fueron sus descendientes quienes crearon esta base de datos de historias familiares que cubre seis pequeñas ciudades. Aquí encontramos la mayor información sobre la Malecz de la preguerra. Los que permanecieron en casa fueron aniquilados por la ocupación alemana. Uno de los escasos supervivientes, Shmuel Mordechai Rubinstein, que pasó 27 meses en Auschwitz, en su autobiografía escrita en 1978 dejó una precisa información sobre la vida de la ciudad antes de la Guerra.


La primera mención escrita de la iglesia ortodoxa de Malecz data de 1563. Los registros eclesiáticos que empiezan a fines de 1700 también nos dan su nombre, Семеновская, lo que significa que estaba dedicada a San Simeón. Sin embargo, el escudo de aquella ciudad mercado, vigente desde 1645, representaba a San Pedro. El catálogo ilustrado de los monumentos de la arquitectura bielorrusa fija la fecha de construcción de la iglesia actual en 1873 o 1928 (!). Probablemente ambas fechas son correctas: la primera para su erección y la segunda para la reconstrucción. Ahora veremos por qué. La fecha de 1873 también se ajusta temporalmente a la de la preparación de los lujosos evangelios. Sería tarea de los historiadores locales averiguar si las personas nombradas en la introducción pueden documentarse en el Malecz de por entonces.


La Primera Guerra Mundial llegó a la ciudad en 1915. La ofensiva conjunta de los ejércitos alemán y austrohúngaro, lanzada en mayo, alcanzó en verano la frontera oriental polaco-rusa y allí permaneció hasta 1917, con el colapso de Rusia. Los cosacos instalados entre Brest y Pinsk se retiraron sin luchar, pero no sin incendiar cuantos asentamientos no les dieran el dinero suficiente para evitarlo. Shmuel Mordechai Rubinstein lo recuerda así en su autobiografía de Malecz:

Los cosacos rusos fueron los últimos en retirarse del empuje alemán durante la [Primera] Guerra. Nuestra ciudad carecía de oficiales públicos y a los vecinos no se les ocurrió la idea de recolectar una suma de dinero y estar atentos para sobornar a los cosacos, por lo que los cosacos sencillamente quemaron los pueblos hasta los cimientos (...) Todos los libros fueron destruidos por las llamas, así que no se podía comprobar la edad de nadie (...). Los gentiles marcharon a Rusia, por miedo a los alemanes. Se abandonó el campo (...) Entre 1917 y 1919 los no judíos empezaron a regresar a sus casas desde Rusia (...) pocos años después la ciudad estaba reconstruida y la vida empezó a mejorar.

Y debió ser en este tiempo cuando el teniente Ferenc Fischer, al entrar en la ciudad con los soldados austrohúngaros, encontró los evangelios. No sabemos cómo escaparon del fuego que devastó la iglesia, ni por qué quien los salvó no se los llevó consigo a Rusia. Quizá era un objeto demasiado pesado para un fugitivo, o puede que lo dejara escondido momentáneamente a la espera de una inmediata recuperación, quién sabe. Pero una cosa parece cierta, que el teniente no lo obtuvo por rapiña sino que lo rescató después de la destrucción de la iglesia por los cosacos.

La razón por la cual el teniente actuó así y por qué se llevó a casa como «souvenir» justamente este libro con los evangelios en eslavo eclesiástico quizá pueda iluminarse un poco con la tercera anotación del libro.

Ex hoc libro discebam linguam paleo-slovenicam. Гаврило Мустяновичь theol. gr.r.cat.
(Aprendí el antiguo eslavo con este libro. Gavrilo Mustyanovich, Teólogo Greco-Católico)

La nota del seminarista greco-católico Gavrilo Mustyanovich es muy posterior a la del teniente Ferenc Fischer. Tampoco hemos podido averiguar quién era ni cómo le llegó el libro. Su nombre es típicamente rusin, de aquella región montañosa que, como Subcarpatia, hasta 1918 perteneció a Hungría y hoy pertenece a Ucrania como Transcarpatia (o Rutenia Transcarpática), en la región más occidental de Ucrania. Según el ya citado diccionario de Pavlo Chuchko, Прізвища закарпатських українців. Історико-етимологічний словник (Apellidos de los ucranianos transcarpáticos. Diccionario histórico-etimológico), Львів 2005, p. 403, el nombre proviene del rumano mustean, que significa «fabricante de mosto». Stefan Mustyanovich (†1865) fue el autor de una Topographica descriptio Ruthenorum in comitatibus Marmaros et Beregh habitantium (Descripción topográfica de los rusin que habitan en los condados de Mármara y Bereg), publicada en 1851. El poeta rusin N. L. Mustyanovich fue un ardiente defensor de la autonomía de la lengua rusin en oposición al ucraniano y el ruso. Y un interesante artículo en La nación rusin cuenta una historia de inicios del siglo pasado sobre un «misionero» greco-católico llamado Mustyanovich que fue enviado por el obispo Gyula Firczák, junto con otros tres compañeros, al pueblo de Iza, en las montañas de los Cárpatos encima de Hust, para contrapesar la creciente influencia ortodoxa. Pero en lugar de cumplir el mandato, enseguida se pusieron a propagar la doctrina ortodoxa.

No se excluye que el propio Ferenc Fischer proviniera de esta región y fuera de confesión greco-católica; y que llevara consigo aquellos evangelios eslavos abandonados con la esperanza de que los fieles que usaran la misma lengua litúrgica pudieran aprovecharlo. Los soldados enviados al frente del este eran reclutados de manera abusiva en la zona noreste de Hungría —uno de nuestros abuelos, nacido en el pueblo de Mándok, en la región del Alto Tisza ahora en la frontera ucraniana, también estuvo entre ellos— donde la proporción de creyentes greco-católicos aún hoy es elevada. El regimiento de nuestro abuelo publicó después de la guerra un «álbum de memoria» que consignaba el nombre, origen y religión de cada soldado. No es imposible que el regimiento de Ferenc Fischer publicara también un álbum similar que nos diría si nuestras suposiciones son ciertas.

Finalmente, tampoco sabemos, ni siquiera, cómo llegó este libro a Kalocsa. No había huella suya en el catálogo y, a pesar de sus inusuales dimensiones, idioma y aspecto, ni un solo bibliotecario había reparado en él. Ni el nombre del teniente, ni el del seminarista les suena a nadie de la Biblioteca. Parece como si el libro se hubiera hecho presente de golpe, como testigo de una Europa Oriental multicolor que una vez existió para ser lijada por las tragedias del siglo veinte.

En enero de 2007, en el obituario de Ryszard Kapuściński, István Kovács escribió:

Kapuściński adquirió su experiencia de la tiranía en las cunetas del Infierno. Tenía siete años y medio cuando su tierra fue repartida entre Hitler y Stalin ante la indiferencia de Gran Bretaña y Francia, aliadas de Polonia. Su ciudad natal, Pinsk, en cuya plaza principal el cerkov ortodoxo, la iglesia católica y la sinagoga habían permanecido durante siglos se convirtió en una dependencia de la Unión Soviética. Pronto empezó la deportación de los polacos a Siberia. El padre de Kapuściński tuvo que huir, y el resto de la familia le siguió para encontrar un domicilio provisional en una barriada de Varsovia. En el verano de 1941 los nazis entraron en Pinsk, cosa que significó el exterminio de su población judía. El plan largamente querido por el autor de describir el mundo de su infancia, esto es, de rehacer el cuadro destrozado de la Europa del Este con las teselas de múltiples formas y colores que forman los grupos étnicos, las culturas, las lenguas y las religiones, queda ahora como un sueño para la eternidad.

De aquel mosaico no construido, este libro es una pequeña pieza.

And on earth peace

Dedicado a Enrique Lázaro

In the Cathedral Library of Kalocsa tomorrow opens the exhibition of the uniquely valuable ancient Bibles collected through several centuries by a long series of bibliophile archbishops. Two precious illuminated medieval copies, a Bohemian Psaltery from the beginning of the 1400’s and a Parisian manuscript of the letters of St. Paul from around 1250 have already been published on DVD by Studiolum.

We have also participated in the selection of the exhibition items. This is how we have discovered a peculiar Bible that was not even registered in the catalog of the library.


This folio edition of the four gospels in Church Slavonic is protected by a lavishly decorated metal binding. Originally the enamelled images of Christ and the four evangelists were inserted in the front cover, and that of the Holy Trinity in the back cover. The four little legs on the back cover indicate that the evangeliary, as it is habitual in Orthodox liturgy, was permanently placed on the book-holder on the altar, representing Christ who remains with His church until the end of times.




The introduction of the book lists the names of all those who financially contributed to the preparation – printing, binding or decoration – of this copy, also indicating its being not an ordinary publication, but a precious liturgical book individually fabricated with large costs, and intended for an honored place. The end of the introduction gives the date of publication in the Old Style of the Orthodox Church, informing us that the book was completed in Moscow, in the typography of the Holy Synod, in the 7400th year after the creation of the world and in the 1892 after the incarnation of the Verb, on the sixth day of August. The place and date were also added with pencil in Hungarian under the printed text.


The evangeliary also includes two more handwritten inscriptions, the one on the first and the other on the last inner backpaper. It is exactly these inscriptions that make this book so incomparably individual, reconstructing a fascinating historical and geographical context around it.

Souvenir from the Russian battle field.
Malec (Pružany district, Grodno governorate, Lithuania)
November 22, 1916.
Ferenc Fischer
Hungarian hussar lieutenant

At the first glance one is shocked at this sacrilege, and immediately imagines the Hungarian soldiers pillaging the Orthodox churches in the occupied Lithuanian territories and taking home the stolen ecclesiastical objects as “war souvenirs”. However, if one sees to the events then he will see that things were completely different.


The Grodno (Grodna, Горадня, Гродна, Hrodna, Gardinas, הורדנה, Gorodna, Гродно) Governorate was shaped up in 1796, after the division of the historical Polish-Lithuanian Kingdom, of the territories that fell to Russia, and its borders changed a lot even in the Tsarist times. The town that had belonged to the Lithuanian Grand Duchy, and then to the Polish Kingdom, after World War I got back to the reestablished Poland. From 1939 it became part of the Soviet Union, although it was also occupied by Germany between 1941 and 1944. Since 1990 it has been part of the independent Belarus where the largest part of the former Governorate belongs, while a smaller part of the same Governorate is shared among Poland and Lithuania. Thus the elder citizens of Grodno can tell the same that those of the not so distant Hungarian town of Ungvár (Ужгород) in Ukraine: that they have lived in five countries without ever leaving their town. At least those who have at all survived these movements of the earth.

The Grodno Governorate in the Atlas of Marks (not that Marx!) (Большой всемирный настольный атласъ Маркса, second, revised edition, 1910, detail of Table 9)

Malecz (Малеч, Malech, Maliecz, Maletsch, Malch, Maltz, Maltesch, Малечь), once a market-town, today a village, lays around the middle of the former Grodno Governorate, among lakes and swamps, half way between Bialystok, scene of the Fiddler on the Roof and Pinsk, native town of Ryszard Kapuściński about which he writes so charming in the first chapter of his volume The Empire. The settlement is situated to the south-east of letter “H” of the inscription ГУБЕРНIЯ on the above table of Marks’s large atlas. The statistical compendium of Grodno Governorate informs us that the town was inhabited by Polish, Belarussian, Russian and Jewish population, further colored by some Armenian, German and Tatar minority, all of them following different religions – as in all the Cherta from the Baltic to the Black Sea. A part of the Jewish population of 10-15% started to emigrate to America from the beginning of the century, and it was their descendants who created the family history database extending to six little towns that contains the most information about pre-war Malecz. Those remaining at home were annihilated by the German occupiers. One of the few survivors, Shmuel Mordechai Rubinstein who spent 27 months in Auschwitz, gives a detailed description about the life of the town before the war in his autobiography written in 1978.


The first written record on the Orthodox church in Malecz comes from 1563. The church registries beginning with the end of the 1700’s also mention its name: Семеновская, which means that it was dedicated to Saint Simeon. Nevertheless, the seal of the market-town in use since 1645 represented Saint Peter. The illustrated catalog of the Belarussian architectural monuments fixes the date of construction of the present church at 1873 or 1928. Probably both dates are correct, the first one being that of its construction, while the second of its reconstruction, soon we will see why. The date of 1873 would also fit in time with the preparation of the sumptuous evangeliary. It would be the task of local historians to see whether the persons named in its introduction can be documented in Malecz of that time.


World War I reached the town in 1915. The united offensive of the German and Austro-Hungarian armies, launched in May, arrived by summer to the Eastern borders of Russian-Poland, and it remained there until 1917, the collapse of Russia. The Cossacks stationed between Brest and Pinsk retired without fighting, but not without burning all those settlements that had not enough money to bribe them. Shmuel Mordechai Rubinstein recalls it like this in his Malecz autobiography:

The Russian Cossacks were the last to retreat from the Germans during the [First World] War. Our town had no public officials and it did not occur to the people to collect a sum of money and be on the alert to bribe the Cossacks, so the Cossacks simply burned the villages to the ground. (…) All the books were destroyed in the fire, so there was no way to prove anyone’s age. (…) All the gentiles fled to Russia, for fear of the Germans. Fields were abandoned. (…) Between 1917 and 1919 the non-Jews began returning home from Russia. (…) A few years later the town was rebuilt, and life began to improve.

It was probably at this time that Lieutenant Ferenc Fischer, entering the town with the Austro-Hungarian army, found the evangeliary. It is not known how it escaped the destruction by fire of the church, and why the person saving it did not take it with himself to Russia. Perhaps it was too heavy for the fugitives, or perhaps it was left somewhere in the hope of a close return – who knows. That much is sure that the lieutenant did not obtain it by pillaging, but took care of it after the destruction of the church by the Cossacks.

The reason of why he did so and why he took home as a “souvenir” exactly this Gospel book in Church Slavonic, can be perhaps enlightened to some extent by the third handwritten inscription in the book.

Ex hoc libro discebam linguam paleo-slovenicam. Гаврило Мустяновичь theol. gr.r.cat.
(I learned Old Slavonic from this book. Gavrilo Mustyanovich Greco-Catholic theologian)

The inscription of the Greco-Catholic seminarist Gavrilo Mustyanovich is much later than that of Lieutenant Ferenc Fischer. We do not know who he was and how this book got to him. His name is a typical Rusyn name from that mountainous region which as Subcarpathia until 1918 belonged to Hungary, and today as Transcarpathian Rus is the westernmost region of Ukraine. According to the already cited thesaurus of Pavlo Chuchko, Прізвища закарпатських українців. Історико-етимологічний словник (Family names of the Transcarpathian Ukrainians. A historico-etymological dictionary), Львів 2005, p. 403, it comes from the Romanian name Mustean meaning „grape juice producer”. Stefan Mustyanovich (†1865) was the author of a Topographica descriptio Ruthenorum in comitatibus Marmaros et Beregh habitantium (Topographical description of the Rusyns living in Máramaros and Bereg counties of Hungary), published in 1851. The Rusyn poet N. L. Mustyanovich was an ardent defender of the autonomy of the Rusyn language as opposed to Ukrainian and Russian. And an interesting article in the Rusyn Nation publishes a story from the turn of the last century about a Greco-Catholic “missionarian” called Mustyanovich who was sent, together with three companions, by bishop Gyula Firczák to the village of Iza in the Carpathian mountains above Hust to counterbalance the growing Orthodox influence, but instead of this soon he also started to propagate Orthodox teachings.

It is not excluded that Ferenc Fischer himself originated from this region and was of Greco-Catholic faith, and that he took with himself the abandoned Slavonic Gospel book because he hoped that his fellow Christians using the same liturgical language can take use of it. Soldiers sent to the Eastern front were overwhelmingly recruited in nearby North-Eastern Hungary – my grandfather, born in the village of Mándok at the Upper Tisza region, now at the Ukrainian border, was also among them – where the proportion of Greco-Catholic believers is still high today. The regiment of my grandfather published a “memorial album” after the war that included the name, origins and religion of each soldier. It is not impossible that the regiment of Ferenc Fischer also published a similar album that could help us to decide whether our assumption is right

And finally we do not even know how this book got to Kalocsa. It has no trace in the catalog and, in spite of its unusual dimensions, language and appearance, even the librarians have just noticed it now. Neither the name of the lieutenant, nor that of the seminarist sound familiar to them. It looks as if the book suddenly appeared there as a survivor of an once existing many-colored East European world that was washed away by the tragedies of the twentieth century.

István Kovács wrote in January 2007 in the obituary of Ryszard Kapuściński:

Kapuściński took his personal experience about tyranny from the ditches of Hell. He was seven and half years old when his homeland fell a victim of the partition among Hitler and Stalin, accompanied by the indifference of Britain and France, allies of Poland. His native town Pinsk, at the main square of which the Orthodox cerkov, the Catholic church and the synagogue had got on well together for centuries, now fell to the Soviet Union. Soon they started the deportation of the Polish population to Siberia. The father of Kapuściński had to flee, and the rest of the family followed him as well to find a temporary home in the neighborhood of Warsaw. In the summer of 1941 the Nazis entered Pinsk that meant the extirpation of the Jewish population of the town. The plan, cherished for so long time by the author, to describe the world of his childhood, that is, to pave the ruined wall of Eastern Europe with the small slabs of many shapes and colors of the various ethnic groups, cultures, languages and religions, has now remained a dream for the eternity.

Of this never realized mosaic is one little slab this book.

Aurel Stein in China

Aurel Stein, discoverer of the sand-buried settlements of the Silk Road and of the manuscripts of Dunhuang, in his last will of 1934 bequeathed to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences all his library and almost five thousand archive photos. However, it took almost fifteen years until his legacy arrived at its place of destination.

Stein died on October 26, 1943, only some days after his arrival to Afghanistan where he intended to reconstruct the trace of the military expedition of Alexander the Great. “I had a wonderful life that could have not finished happier than by finally coming to Afghanistan, which I have been longing to see for sixty years.” – were his last words.

However, his legacy left in London, as soon as it was legally passed to the Hungarian Academy, was seized by the Department of the Sequestration of Enemy Goods as property of a hostile state, and they set about its sale as ordained by law. The Academy could obtain only the books left in Kashmir that at the death of Stein were not in Britain. However, when after the conclusion of the war they could have started to take them to Budapest, the iron curtain fell, and the books remained in the custody of the Bodleian Library. Only by 1957 the international situation was eased that much that the legacy could be delivered to Budapest, including among others the unparalleled collection of archive photos taken by Stein in the course of his Central Asian expeditions.

This collection has been recently processed and digitized in collaboration of the specialists of the British Library and the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. The completion of the works coincided with the centenary of the discovery of the Dunhuang library cave, celebrated by the participants with an international conference organized in Budapest. To increase the solemnity of the conference, a first exhibition of a hundred selected archive photos of Stein was also opened at the Hungarian Academy on November 22, 2007, whose web edition was prepared by us in Studiolum in English, Spanish and Hungarian versions.

The news about this important international collaboration, about the conference and the exhibition spread quickly, and thus it happened that the Hong Kong bussinesman Paul Kan, Chairman of Champion Technology and sponsor of a number of exhibitions connected with the history and art of China, offered his support to the organization of a much larger exhibition presenting all the photo collection in the University Museum and Art Gallery of Hong Kong. This exhibition was opened some weeks ago – its beautiful leaflet can be found here in pdf format –, and now we are working on the preparation of its web edition in Chinese, English, Spanish and Hungarian.

The name of Aurel Stein – in Chinese 史坦因, Shĭtănyīn – has not sounded very well thus far in China. The Chinese official line regards him as one of the imperialists who used to steal the cultural values of the country, and not as the discoverer of the library cave who saved several ten thousands of unique documents from the devastation that soon fell on the rest of the Dunhuang monuments in the period of the civil war and of the Japanese occupation. An exhibition like this would have been unimaginable in China even only ten years ago. It is possible that Hong Kong, like so many times before in Chinese cultural politics, functions as a testing place and attests the silent change of this position.

Educational film

At infanata.org, the generous popularizer of Russian book publishing, more and more old Russian film strips have been recently published. The Hungarian version of this fascinating genre was the most important visual source in our TV-less and movieless childhood, and we think back with nostalgia on it. My brother Gyuri has hunted with great effort for the surviving copies and for a working film strip projector in order to transmit this experience to his children in Copenhagen. I am now happy to see its Russian versions, on which our contemporaries grew up in the Soviet Union. These pictures also confirm my impression that twentieth-century Russian tale illustrations have indeed come forth from the cloak of the great Art Nouveau illustrator and stage designer Ivan Bilibin.

I am particularly delighted to see that the folk tales are performed by animal figures vested in the various national costumes of the Soviet Union and of the friendly countries.

One of the most surprising discovery among them is the story The two envious bear cubs whose first picture announces of having been composed of Hungarian folk tale motifs. It is even more surprising that not only the author Vazhdaev took the elements from the tale The two bear cubs, the fox and the cheese, but also the illustrator Repkin the motifs of the vests from Hungarian national costume.

Even the fox received a cute bride-vest of Kalotaszeg. It stands very fine on her hourglass waist. True, on this picture, around the end of the story she has already rounded out as a consequence of the great amounts of cheese shared to herself. In fact, in the course of the distribution she is visibly getting fatter and fatter from picture to picture.

I do not know whether this film strip induced our Russian contemporaries to link the name of Hungarians with envy for a life, but if it did, they did not make a big mistake. And in addition they could learn of it well in advance how Hungarian politicians and Hungarian electors look like towards the end of the election term. Even though all these concepts did not even exist at that time.

I wish we learned of it as well.

Rumi and Bach

It is a strange experience to see that not only our Western world cherishes fantasies on other civilizations, but they also do on us. True, for most of them the culture of the West is already a reality built in their everyday lives that does not leave much room for fantasy. However, there are also some exceptions like for example Persia.

I do not know whether the story I heard as a teenager that Khomeini, when asked about his opinion on the music of Bach and Beethoven answered like “I do not know these gentlemen” is true or not. However, that much is sure that nowadays there is not much possibility to get familiar with them in Iran.

The furnishings of the CD shops in Tehran are elegant, their supply of CDs majestic, and their assistants are entrancingly friendly. They can compete with any Western shop. We willingly spent several hours in them, listening to Persian classical CDs, slurping tea – in the Siyah o Sefid (“Black and White,” because it shares his premises with a movie theater) there was no tea, so we received peach drink in paper box with straw – and talking about the musicians with the assistants who often play some Iranian instrument themselves. The only thing that struck us was the supply of European classical CDs. Not that there were none, because indeed there were some. But that their supply was just as casual as that of Chinese, Arabic or Persian classical music in most European CD shops. Good and bad ones mixed up, randomly selected, and displayed without any internal principle of organization – we are so much accustomed to these uniform principles of organization applied in every European CD shop that their lack surprises us. All this made us suspect that local public knew this music no better than ours knows Chinese, Arab or Persian music. And we suspected it well.

Still at home we had invented that we would take with us some Bach CDs as a gift. Those musics we love the most and we esteem the highest – the solo violin sonatas performed by Grumiaux and the Art of the Fugue by Sokolov – and through which we can show the very best of our culture to those people whose culture had given so much wonderful music to us in the past years. It was peculiar to watch the faces of the people presented with these CDs. Apart from the novelty that the European man gives – as far as we saw, this was surprising to everyone –, they reflected a deep, but reserved reverence, as if they received the works of a great philosopher in deluxe binding, in the original language. They knew that Bach is a great name for a great civilization, but they had no personal link to him. It happened just in the Siyah o Sefid that talking about what makes good music we put one of the CDs in the player, and while Sokolov was playing, we analyzed why the music he was playing was good. The CD was over the half when the assistant – who was by the way very well versed in Persian classical music – got it that this was also music and not just a cultural icon, and that it can be played and analyzed just like his own well known music. That he can have a personal relation to it.

Davood Azad has not yet got it. As a well known Persian lute player and singer and, not least, as a real Sufi, two years ago, in the Year of Rumi he published in honor of his master Rumi his CD The Divan of Rumi and Bach, on which he sings the poems of Rumi accompanying himself on tar, the typical Northern Iranian lute of the shape of a number 8, while the ground is given by some piano works of Bach. This could theoretically result in something interesting, although I have never heard any rearrangement of Bach that added something to the value of the original instead of decreasing it. But the result is unconvincing. The music has a grotesque, comic effect. It is split in a strange way. The singing and the tar are up to the standards of Persian music, although their quality is undoubtedly harmed by the fact that they have to give up the meditative rhythm of Persian music and have to adapt themselves to the bound European rhythm. The piece of Bach, however, sounds as mechanical and primitive as a hurdy-gurdy.


Rumi: Blessings unto you + Bach: Third English Suite, Gavotte I and II (7'40")

Jean Durand writes in his great introductory monograph The art of Persian music (Washington, 1991): “When we do not understand a kind of music, we tend to find it monotonous and repetitive. Western music, in fact, seems very monotonous to many Orientals.” If this is true, then on this CD we can hear with our own ears how it seems to them.

It is a strange feeling to hear Bach in the presentation of a musician who is technically qualified enough for the acoustic reproduction of the score, but does not possess the tradition that could lead him how to perform it. In Europe, by the time one learns to master the piano at this level, he has already acquired – to a great extent without being aware of it – this tradition as well. He knows what this music is about, what its inner dynamic – in Bach, the counterpoint – is that he has to unfold in the performance, and how large room it leaves to him to unfold his own personality. He will have a personal relation to it. This relation can be of many kind, from the subtle, signal-like decorations of Perahia through the rich tones of Schiff to the tensions of Glenn Gould. Even the extreme aloofness of Robert Levin is not identical with the mechanical sound of Azad’s hurdy-gurdy: aloofness is also a relation you can like or dislike. (Nevertheless, I find it peculiar that the Bachakademie of Stuttgart selected exactly his performance for the Complete Works of Bach by Hänssler.)


Murray Perahia, Gavotte I (1'32") and Gavotte II (1'38")

Glenn Gould, Gavotte I (0'50") and Gavotte II (1'09")

Robert Levin, Gavotte I and II (3'48")

András Schiff, Gavotte I and II (3'21")

Ivo Pogorelich, Gavotte I and II (4'31")

The question is why one performs a music he has no relation to. By reading the Persian and Western press of Azad I see that most probably for the same reason which encourages European and American groups to perform – completely misunderstood – Tibetan or Arabic music: because there is a demand for it on the market. Persian blogs write with awe about “our son” who was able to put even Western music into the service of Islam mysticism, while Western esoteric circles listen with awe to the shreds of Oriental music, extremely simplified and forced into the frames of Western rhythm and melody, and played with an etherealized expression by an an enchantingly guru-looking Iranian Sufi. How much simpler and more rewarding is this than what the greatest living tar player Majid Derakhshani does, for example, by establishing in Germany an institution for the dissemination of real Persian music in the Western world, and by performing with such musical accompaniment the poems of Rumi, as in the following recording where he performs together with the greatest living Persian singer Mohammad Reza Shajarian.

Rumi - Shajarian, Derakhshani: Ân jâm-e jân afzâi-râ bar-riz bar jân sâqia!
(Pour that soul-increasing goblet in my soul, cup-bearer!)

Hen panta einai. All Is One

“Sufi” – wrote an American student in the rubrics “Religion” of the statistical questionnaire distributed at the seminary of phenomenology of religion. “Sufi?” I asked her. “What do you do as a Sufi?” “Well, we perform Sufi dances and read the poems of Rumi.” “That is, you know Persian?” “No, why? Rumi has been translated in English!”

The philologically faithful translation of the great didactic poem Mathnawī of Jalaladdin Rumi in fact renders correctly the content of the work, but it does not convey anything of the beauty of the poem. And in the very free versions made on the basis of English prose translations quite often the original meaning is lost, as well as the wonderful word plays and associations. I breathed a sigh. “Do you also study the Quran?” I asked the Sufi girl. She looked incredulously at me. “Why? We are Sufis, not – how do they say it – Mohammedans!” I shaked my head. “But Sufis are Muslim mystics!” I answered. “Oh no, we love every religion. Love is the most important thing!” she said with shining face. I did a last attempt. “And what do you know about the prophet Mohamed?” As I had suspected, she did not know anything about him who for every Sufi is the starting and focal point of his own chain of masters and disciples, and who, in their eyes, was the first real Sufi. I gave it up.

But what can we do when a very popular author boldly asserts that Goethe, Saint Francis, Napoleon and many others were Sufis? On what basis can we expect of the public a deeper knowledge of the history and essence of Sufism? For it is not easy anyway to answer the question what Sufism is and what makes a Sufi.

(Annemarie Schimmel, Sufismus. Eine Einführung in die islamische Mystik, München: Beck, 2000)

Litany

A year ago, on the day of Annunciation opened Kata her Garden Diary to report on the everyday life of our garden.

The day of Annunciation in this year coincided with the sprouting of buds after a long winter. We celebrated the anniversary with a photo gallery published on them in the diary. You are advised to click on the images, because they really live only when enlarged!

Kata’s earlier photo sets about our garden have been published on the Garden page of her Hortus Carmeli site. Soon they will be extended as well.