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

Pink postcards 1.

These letters, which we now begin to publish, followed each other for several years. We also want to publish them in the same amount of time, with God’s help, each letter exactly one hundred years after it was sent.

Let us first get to know (at least superficially) the addressee and the sender of these letters.

The girl Antonia Zajac was born in 1896 in a western Galician village, Cieklin, in the valley of the Dunajec.
Her ancestors came from a gentry noble family, who gradually lost all their wealth in revels and on cards. Her father, who found it difficult to bear that he had to work as an employee in their former estate, chose emigration to America instead of constant shame.
From their native place it seemed the easiest to leave from an Adriatic port, which was used for large scale emigration by the citizens of the Monarchy. However, arriving at Budapest, the father died, and the mother with her four children was trapped in the foreign and apparently hopeless city. But Óbuda – the half-agricultural, half-industrial northern suburb of Buda, which will join Budapest in 1873 – did not abandon the orphans, just as she took many other homeless families under her care. She also took under her protective wings the sons and daughters of Hungarian, German, Jewish, Slavic and any other ethnic groups, who were bound together by poverty and a common instinct of staying afloat.
The eldest boy, Feri, became an assistant upholsterer, while his three younger sisters, Antónia (one of the protagonists of our story) was employed in a braid workshop, and Vera and Manci got jobs in the renowned local Goldberger textile factory, the Goli, as it was commonly called.


The other protagonist of our story, Károly Timó (born Szedlák), was born in 1892 to a maiden, Katalin Szedlák, and adopted by a kind-hearted childless shoemaker of Óbuda, Ferenc Timó and his wife, née Anna Hautschild.

Károly Timó grew up in Óbuda, and after elementary school he became an apprentice, and later assistant braidmaker. The workshop of his master Bernát Reiner was in the Terézváros district, in one of the then new houses of the Kleine Johannes Gasse (later János Kis, Piroska Szalmás, now László Németh Street). The young boy had far to go to reach the workshop. The tram was cumbersome and expensive, so every morning, he crossed the Danube with the propeller, and walked three quarters of an hour through the Angyalföld and Erzsébetváros districts.

However, his short weekends were reserved for private life. Their common residence in Óbuda, and their common profession brought the young people close to each other. Clinging together, founding a family also meant a chance to cope with the difficulties of life.

This photo of the delicate, dreamy-eyed Polish girl is a document of the budding relationship, of a modest flirtation.

“On 29. Oct. 1913. In memory to Károly T., from Antónia Z.”

Her eyes are clear blue, this is still suggested by the faded features. The grease-stained and frayed lower part of the slightly worn photo shows that the owner carried with him the picture given to him for a long time.

The studio photos of the young couple already suggest a serious relationship, and a marriage planned in the near future.


But as we know, everything got examined and weighed. The machine was launched. Optimistically, with the promise of the close victory. By the time the leaves fall…

The first pink postcard



Name of the sender: Károly Timó
Address: To the honored Miss. Antónia Zajác
3rd district, Kis Korona Street 52.
Budapest

on the 28th [of August 1914]

My dear son [note the typical form of address of husbands and fiancés to their women at the turn of the century!]
I write these few lines while frying bacon in Szerencs in the morning. What do you say about this surprise! I thought that even as late as on the 10th I will be in Budapest. The journey is quite pleasant, although we go very slow. I slept in Miskolc, now I go to Sátoraljaújhely, and from there to Mezőlaborc [in 2014, Medzilaborce, Slovakia]. Along the way we will get a hot meal, because they cook for us. For some 3-4 more days we will be doing well, and then we will start to play soldiers. Embracing and kissing you
Károly

My greetings to your mother and sisters, and to my parents.

[The first postcard was written along the way to the front. A nice soldier-playing is in view!]

Next postcard: 25 September 1914