Mills of God

It was already a long while ago that the Hungarian edition of the GEO Magazine, in the sign of altruistic popular instruction – the point is not who wrote it, only that it should be true – cut and paste their article about the great Hungarian discoverer of the Silk Road Aurel Stein from the images and text of the site prepared by Studiolum about the legacy of Stein preserved in the Oriental Collection of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. They have only omitted the name of Studiolum and of the Academy, perhaps in order we should not be charged with the superficiality and gross misunderstandings of the article.

In the course of two months, two letters from the Head of the Collection (in a very polite tone) and then two more from the Director of the Library (somewhat more irritated) finished in some registrar’s office similar to the above one at the Magazine, although they only asked of the local equivalent of this lady to be so kind to publish subsequently, in the next edition the name of the Library where the uniquely valuable archive photos of Stein are preserved.

But everyone has a boss, and in the Hamburg mother editorial office of GEO, after a moment of stunned silence, they promised immediate action. In the next morning a reply arrived from the editor in chief of the Hungarian edition.

The emergence of this uncomfortable situation cannot be excused by any reference to the imminent deadline of the magazine, therefore I do not even apologize.

No, no, for God’s sake. The more so as the magazine has seen even two deadlines since the first letter. I do not even wish it to my enemy.

The August edition of the magazine has just arrived to the newspaper stands. The disclaimer at the end of the letters of the correspondents ends like this:

In order to remedy our fault, now we correct this oversight: Oriental Collection of the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. The homepage of the institution is: http://dunhuang.mtak.hu.

The homepage of the institution is in the reality http://www.mtak.hu, while the above address belongs to the Stein site. This illustrates well why it is not worth to read the article of the GEO. Read the Stein pages instead (in English and in Spanish) if already GEO was so kind to publish the address. Soon an enlarged edition will come out as well, with the complete material of the Hongkong photo exhibition embracing the whole life of Aurel Stein.

The source of the illustration of our post is the August 2008 edition of the Hungarian version of the GEO Magazine.