Pink postcards 25

Name of the sender: Károly Timó, 1st March Regiment Address of the sender: Martini Battalion Bányay Company

Field Post 350

FIELD POSTCARD

Address: To the honored Miss Antonia Zajác
3rd district, Kis-Korona Street 52.
Budapest

Previous letters (gray dots): • Galicia, 25 July 1915 • Galicia, 14 July 1915 • Galicia, 12 July 1915 • Galicia, 6 July 1915 • Galicia, 25 June 1915 • Galicia, 10 June 1915 • Debrecen, 5 June 1915 • Budapest, 1 June 1915 • Budapest, 1 March 1915 • Budapest, 10 February 1915 • Kecskemét, 30 January 1915 • Dukla Pass, 11 January 1915 • Felsőhunkóc, 4 January 1915 • Sztropkó, 31 December 1914 • Budapest, 23 December 1914 • Budapest, 21 December 1914 • Budapest, 11 December 1914 • Budapest, 2 December 1914 • Budapest, 28 November 1914 • Budapest, 27 November 1914 • Budapest, 18 November 1914 • Budapest, 27 October 1914 • Debrecen, 25 September 1914 • Szerencs, 28 August 1914

My dear son

2 Aug

Today I received your long-awaited postcard, to which I have been looking forward for a long time. Why do you write so rarely? It seems you felt well in Siófok, because you have not even sent me a card from there, although I asked you. But that’s no problem, I hope you will make up for it now. The main thing is that you felt well. I am still well, but I cannot wait to see you. What does your mother do, is she healthy? Are Veronka and Mariska well? Still no news about Feri?

Stefán also wrote this week, they have too little work. About Kozma and Béla there are no news. They have not written to them for a long time.

I have no other news for now.

Countless embraces and kisses from
Károly.

My regards to those at home.

Write me a lot.


[Round number. The twenty-fifth pink postcard to the address of Kiskorona Street 52, in Óbuda, northeastern Budapest.

The street still exists, although time has done its relentless work on it.

Let us go then, at least mentally, to the place, in Kiskorona Street, where the pink postcards had been addressed.

A detail of the overview map of Budapest, 1:5000

The street is situated on the mountain side of Lajos utca, which runs parallel to the bank of Danube. It branched out from Lajos utca at Királydomb (King Hill). First it was called Kronen Gasse, which was later translated as Kiskorona (Little Crown). It ended at the western side of Holy Spirit Square, towards Polgár Street. In some eras the whole street or a part of it bore the name of the martyred painter Adolf Fényes. (The Királydomb was a strange formation. A hill, only a few meters high, with narrow plots and houses running down radially from its center. Between 1930 and 1941, the excavations brought to surface the soldiers’ amphitheater of Aquincum which had collapsed under them.)

Even if this street was not as important as Lajos utca, the main street of Óbuda, nevertheless it had a lot of tiny restaurants, artisan workshops and the famous Goldberger textile factory. The Perc (Minute) utca, which crossed Kiskorona Street, received its name after the artisans of the neighborhood, the “Mister Minits” of the period.

As Ernő Zórád transformed in his watercolors the former Tabán into a lovely, sunny hillside with crooked streets, so idealized Gábor Kássa Óbuda, and the former Kiskorona street within it.

Gábor Kássa: The Kiskorona Street

About number 52 we have no picture, only about the third house next to it. The photo of Kiskorona Street 58 must show a house similar to the one which had disappeared without trace. Why would it have looked differently.


By the end of the fifties and sixties this Óbuda was completely run-down, so that it must not have caused too much heartache to destroy it. The bulldozers started. Only a reserve of a small group of houses remained intact around the former Korona Square. The picture below shows the house renovated as Museum of Catering, as well as the one next to it, in whose window writer Gyula Krúdy posed for his famous photo. To the right you see today’s Civilian’s Club of Óbuda, and even more to right, already leaving the photo, the house and atelier of Gyula Knöpfler, the photographer of the street, which was promoted into a home for the elderly.

Korona Square seen from a side plot of the devastated block of flats

Today in the place of the even numbers you see interminable ten-storey blocks of flats, and in that of the odd numbers, some ruins. In the 14th century, Queen Elizabeth, widow of King Charles Robert of Anjou and mother of King Louis the Great, founded here the convent of the Poor Clares. Now only the barely visible remnants are to be found here.

Standing on the top of these recently increased walls, you can imagine somewhere behind the trees that non-existing house, the non plus ultra of dreams.

P.S. Yes, I know, the equipment on the above picture is no bulldozer.]

Next postcard: 6 August 1915