The glass trumpet of the Magi

Every year now, the thre Magi pay their respects on their holiday here on the blog. This time, they are signing in from Mallorca, where they arrived last night on their fancy caravel, and then with their richly loaded camels and their luxurious entourage, they marched around the old town of Palma, distributing blessings and gifts, exactly along the route that the demons will march with their fiery chariots in two weeks.

These days, the procession of the Magi is accompanied by a brass band that fills the streets with rumor commensurate with the importance of the procession. In the nineteenth century, however, the chaotic musical background was provided by the population itself, and its typical instruments were the conch horn and the glass trumpet. The Mallorcan ethnomusicologist Amadeu Corbera Jaume recently devoted a special study to the latter. In this, he pointed out that the glass instruments were prepared by the glass factory workers in the Santa Catalina district of Palma for fun, inbetween real jobs.

“Our joy reached its height when the shouts and screams of the crowd, mingling with the shrill sound of the apocalyptic glass trumpets and the deep bleat of the conch horns, filled the street, announcing that the Magi were here.
«The Holy Magi!» we shouted. And we run out onto the balcony, watching the chaos, the children and lads waving burning torches, among them a figure with blackened face, dressed in dirty and ragged clothes, with a turban made of two different colors on his head, on top of a two-pronged ladder, which was carried by half a dozen street children on their shoulders, in the midst of a huge noise.” (Miquel Binimelis, La Tradición 1897)

The glass trumpets were mostly blown by unruly youngsters, into the faces of the passers-by, also engaging them in other ways. The procession of the Magi in Palma was also a more or less tolerated ritual occasion for street violence, like today’s fans’ parades before and after soccer matches.

“It is with the greatest indignation that we take up our pen to-day to condemn certain acts committed the night before yesterday by bands of boys who, without any consideration, provided with glass trumpets, conch horns and other various dissonant instruments, went about the streets of the city, brandishing torches in their hands, and throwing sparks to right and left, thereby causing considerable harm to the poor passers-by, whose bodies and clothing were in constant danger of damage.” (Diario de Palma Jan. 7, 1863)

However, the traditional objects of violence were not random passers-by, but certain well-established target groups. The Moors disappeared a long time ago, but the Jews were still there. It is true that the Mallorcan Jews, the Xuetas already converted to Christianity in 1391, as I wrote. But once a Jew, forever a Jew.

“I still remember that during the feast of the Magi, the suburban urchins marched up and down the city blowing their glass trumpets. And I also remember the rampage they had every year on Silversmiths’ Street [the main street of the Xueta neighborhood], breaking shop windows and damaging furniture. Fortunately, this came to an end during the time of Mayor Rubert, thanks to the measures of the silversmiths’ committee, whose president, Senyor Felicindo, as tall and fat as St. Paul, I even knew myself.” (From the memoirs of poet Miquel Forteza (1888-1968))

It is no wonder that in Palma the “old Christian” and the Xueta families did not intermarry, no matter how devoutly Catholic the latter were. So much so that even today the Israeli rabbinate recognizes the Xuetas as pure-blooded Jews, who only need to return to the Jewish faith in order to be readmitted to the People. And in the vestibule of the church of St. Eulàlia on Silversmiths Street, one of the three known medieval synagogues, there is still a marble plaque with the names of the Xueta families “who come here to Mass,” since traditionally no other local Catholic ever set foot there.

But times change, and with them the means of noise making. The glass trumpet as an instrument of the poor has disappeared from Mallorca, just as I think that not one of the New Year’s Eve paper trumpets of my childhood can be still found anywhere. It was such a common and cheap item that none were ever kept around. Where it survived, writes Amadeu Corbera Jaume, is in the Museum of Musical Instruments in Brussels. The museum, located in the Art Nouveau style building of the former Old England department store in the museum district of Brussels, was developed by its first curator, Victor-Charles Mahillon, into one of the largest musical instrument collections in the world at the end of the 19th century. He corresponded with folk music collectors worldwide, including Antoni Noguera i Balaguer (1869-1904) from Mallorca, who sent him three glass trumpets among several other Mallorcan folk instruments. They are still in the museum’s collection and are listed as number 1316 in the Mahillon catalogue.

When I got this far in reading the article, I got up and walked to the Museum of Musical Instruments, not far from my place, to see with my own eyes and capture with my own lens the famous noisemakers. But I had no luck. Only a fraction of the nearly four thousand musical instruments collected by Mahillon are exhibited, and they do not include the glass trumpets.

However, it is not pointless to visit the three floors of the Museum of Musical Instruments. You can see wonderful pieces from all over the world. And like the desert of the Little Prince, the collection is also beautiful because it includes three Mallorcan glass trumpets in one of its storerooms. Three items whose story is almost more interesting and important than the items themselves.

Our reputation in the world

In Venice, a small square opens at the side of the San Cassiano parish church, where the Ponte de la Chiesa leads to the Calle dei Morti on the other side. This latter got its name from the parish cemetery that was once there. At the foot of the bridge steps, there stands the marble corner column of the only house in the square, which bears the house number 1854 on its capital. However, the inscription under the capital is only noticed by those who go close enough to see the letters engraved on it in low relief.

The upper, larger part of the inscription was engraved by a skilled hand in regular capital letters:

1686 A DÌ 18 ZUGNO BVDA FV ASEDIATA ET A DÌ 2 SETTEMBRE FV PRESA

Buda was besieged on June 18, 1686, and occupied on September 2

Beneath, another date was engraved in a freer hand:

1686 A DI 27 LV

On July 27, 1686

We do not know who considered it important enough to record the dates of the recapture of Buda from the Ottomans. But we know he was not alone.

The history of the liberation of Buda, occupied by Suleyman on August 29, 1541, goes back to September 1683, when the imperial German and Polish armies liberated Vienna from the Turkish siege, and a month later they also recaptured Párkány and Esztergom from the Turks. In the euphoria of the victory, Pope Innocent XI convinced the Hapsburgs, Poland and Venice to establish the Holy League for the recapture of additional Ottoman territories. The League’s troops already besieged Buda in 1684, but that time without success. In 1686, after a long preparation, they returned again and, after a three-month siege, at the cost of heavy losses, the finally took the city on September 2, after almost exactly 145 years of Turkish rule.

Gyula Benczúr: The recapture of Buda Castle, 1896. Entering through the castle’s Vienna Gate, Charles of Lothringen looks at the corpse of the Ottoman commander defending the castle, Arnavut Abdurrahman Abdi Paşa, whose monument stands behind the gate today

The monument to the Turkish commander of Buda stands at the place where he fell on September 2, 1686, defending the castle. It was erected in 1932 by the descendants of György Szabó, who fell in the same place, on the same day, besieging the castle. The inscription on the monument is in Hungarian, Ottoman Turkish and modern Turkish: “Arnavut Abdurrahman Abdi Paşa, the last governor of the 145-year Turkish occupation of Buda, fell near this place on the afternoon of the 2nd day of September of 1686, in the 70th year of his life. He was a heroic adversary, peace be upon him.”

The pasha’s death is also commemorated by Margit Kovács’s naive ceramics of 1977 at the Vienna Gate, at the beginning of Ostrom (Siege) Street. A particular blooper of the ceramics is that the castle in the background is besieged not by Christians, but by Turks, most probably under the influence of Géza Gárdonyi’s popular Stars of Eger, the most extensive romantic description of castle sieges in Ottoman-period Hungary

The recapture of Buda was celebrated all over Europe with fireworks, bell ringing and masses. This was especially the case in Venice, which, as a naval ally of the Holy League, liberated the Peloponnese from the Turks at the same time, which I will write about shortly. The inscription next to San Cassiano was also born out of this enthusiasm. It is not known, however, what the date of July 27 refers to. On that day, General János Eszterházy launched a major attack against the castle, but it was only partially successful, so it is unlikely that this is what the inscription reminds us of.

Fireworks on Brussels’ main square to celebrate the recapture of Buda

Among the celebrating cities was also Brussels, where, in addition to fireworks, several inns adopted Buda’s name. Around the lonely Buda Inn to the north of the city, a small village had developed by the early 19th century, which was later integrated into Greater Brussels as an industrial district.

Della Bosiers’ Fleur de Buda (1971) is about Brussels’ industrial district Buda

The next Hungarian historical event that made the hearts of all of Europe flutter was the revolution of 1956, after which squares and streets were once again renamed. Brussels already had its Buda, so what they did was to give number 56 to the bus going from the European Parliament to Buda quarter.

After the 1956 revolution, tens of thousands of Hungarian refugees were received in Italy as well, and squares in several cities were named after the Hungarian martyrs.

For example, in Capri (copyright by ribizlifőzelék)

Or in the Sicilian town of Piazza Armerina. On this October 23, we commemorated the anniversary here in a truly dignified place.

It was commemorated in a more dignified place by those Subcarpathian Hungarians, who in 1956 could not even dream of participating in the revolution, but now they are doing and promoting exactly what people of their age wanted to achieve in 1956, and what today’s Hungarian government wants to completely forget. After three hundred years, they are now improving our quite worn reputation in the world.    

“Russian, go home. 1956-2022. The 68th Territorial Defense Battalion of Subcarpathia, Ukraine”

Thank you and good bye

After the Estonian, German or Russian war phrasebooks, in which the atrocities to be committed were already coded before the first column started towards the frontier, it is quite refreshing to read a wartime conversational dictionary whose single message is apparently this: “Thanks for having liberated us!”

No, this is no Soviet propaganda distributed in the occupied territories, as our much-experienced readers would immediately think. This phrasebook was published in Belgium in 1944, so every grateful Belgian could chat in English with the tommies and sammies, that is the British and American soldiers.


Unfortunately I have only one page of this dictionary, probably the very first substantive page. But I think this one summarizes the essence of the whole book: thank you and good bye. After all, what else could we talk about, by sweatingly browsing the phrasebook for the building blocks of small talk and trying to intelligibly pronounce in this chewing gum language that down with the Boches, because it is impossible that in America they do not know what the Boches are. That’s quite enough, this is the hour of history, not of language learning, and after all, you will come back after the war, and in the meantime we will have the kid enrolled for an English course.


Instead of the halting conversation, singing is much more suitable to building community. With a genial psychological sense, the phrasebook publishes the text of some songs: the British and American hymn, the Tipperary which has been popular in Belgium since WW1, and of the Siegfried Line. The first three are widely known even today, but the text of the last one has to be published by us as well. This song, mocking the German defense line stretching from Switzerland to the Netherlands, was first heard by the Belgians from the British soldiers coming to the rescue of France in 1940. Although they reached the Siegfried Line only in 1944, the song was not forgotten in the Continent in the meantime either, thanks to the German parody versions and propaganda films mocking the British.


The Two Leslies: We’re going to hang out the washing on the Siegfried Line

We’re going to hang out the washing on the Siegfried Line. Have you any dirty washing, mother dear? We’re gonna hang out the washing on the Siegfried Line. ’Cause the washing day is here.

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Postscript. Kinga in her comment to the Hungarian version wondered why the American soldier was portrayed as a Chinese man. We do not know whether they really intended him to look like a Chinese or he happened to look so only by chance. But why might have not been there some American Chinese as well, say, from the Chinatown of San Francisco? For you know, what those British soldiers looked like whom the Belgians met in May 1940 around Dunquerque/Dunkirk.

Black people in the zoo

Seventy-five years ago, in 1936 closed down the last of the zoo houses in Europe – notably in Turin, and one year before that the penultimate one in Basel – where black people were presented to visitors.

Black people from Somalia in the zoo of Basel, 1930

Black people – and sometimes American natives – were brought since the 16th century by the explorers from the new continents to Europe where they belonged, together with exotic creatures, monkeys, lamas, parrots, to the spectacles of princely courts. The 1870s onwards when, with the emancipation of the bourgeoise, museums of natural history and zoos were opened across Europe as intellectual heirs of the princely cabinets de curiosités, it was considered self-evident that the presentation of exotic fauna also includes black people. At the turn of the century already the zoos in fifteen European cities – including London, Berlin, Basel, Antwerp, and even the Russian Warsaw – offered this attraction. The inhabitants of the African colonies were first exposed in cages, and later in “ethnographic villages” where whole families lived their “traditional form of life” before the eyes of white visitors.



However, the traditional African way of life was not invented for the European winter. According to the data of the Hamburg zoo, only between 1908 and 1912 twenty-seven black people died here during the exposition.

Emperor Wilhelm II. visits the black people in the zoo of Hamburg, 1909

Our reader Helga drew our attention to the fact that during the celebrations of the millennium of the foundation of Hungary (1896) black people were also presented in the zoo of Budapest, namely two hundred and fifty persons. An essay in urbanlegends.hu reports, on the basis of an 1896 edition of Vasárnapi Újság and the ethnographic exhibition The other (2008) that the travel of the black people from Accra was organized by an agent in Lyon, a former French naval officer, who since 1893 had regularly organized similar groups for the world’s fairs in Chicago, Lyon and Bordeaux.

In the same site, an article by Zolán Hanga explores in detail the historical background of the human installations in the zoos. It was Carl Hagenbeck, the major supplier of European zoos who in 1874 brought thirty reindeers from Lappland, and he hired Sami herdsmen to take care of the animals on the way. And once they came, they also brought their tents and equipment, and presented them in the form of a traveling live exhibition across the zoos of Europe. The success was overwhelming, and since then the Hagenbecks included in their portfolio the transport and presentation of exotic people for a long time. When they finally turned to circus productions, other companies took over the industry of human exhibitions.














Although black people were no rarity in the United States, even there were zoos which set on exposition indigenous people coming from Africa, mainly Pygmies whom many contemporary Darwinians considered as a “paleolithic” state of human evolution. Ota Benga, whose village was massacred by the Force Publique of Belgian Congo, was found and brought to the USA by an American missionary to the World’s Fair of St. Louis in 1904. After the exhibition, in 1906 he was brought over to the Bronx Zoo, where he regularly featured in the monkey house in company of an orangutan called Dohong. On the protest of the local Christian churches who considered it humiliating to expose a human person together with animals, the following article was published in the New York Times:

“We do not quite understand all the emotion which others are expressing in the matter… It is absurd to make moan over the imagined humiliation and degradation Benga is suffering. The pygmies… are very low in the human scale, and the suggestion that Benga should be in a school instead of a cage ignores the high probability that school would be a place… from which he could draw no advantage whatever. The idea that men are all much alike except as they have had or lacked opportunities for getting an education out of books is now far out of date.”

Benga committed ritual suicide in 1916, at the age of 32, when with America’s entry to World War I he lost all his hopes to ever be returned to his homeland.


Zoos occasionally exposed the representatives of other “primitive peoples” as well, such as Polynesians, Canadian Inuits, American natives, the indigenous people of Dutch Suriname (on the 1883 World’s Fair of Amsterdam) or Patagonian natives (in Dresden). Moreover, in 1920 the “ethnographic village” of Königsberg also exposed peasants from the Baltic region as representatives of the Baltic Prussians, killed out in the Middle Ages by the Teutonic Order, who performed ancient pagan rites in the presence of the visitors.

Just after the publication of this post we have discovered that the Ptak Science Books blog has also written about the Patagonian natives and the black people of Nubia on exposition in the zoo of Dresden, also publishing their engraved picture from the 1877 and 1879 edition of the Illustrierte Zeitung:

The man-cages of European zoos closed down mostly in the late twenties, partly due to the ideas of the equality of peoples propagated by the League of Nations, and partly because of prosaic reasons: after the great depression the attendance of zoos drastically declined, and now even the provision of the animals met with difficulty. However, black people were occasionally exhibited even decades later, such as on the 1958 World’s Fair in Belgium. Here a whole village was presented together with the inhabitants from Belgian Congo, where the Belgian colonial army only one generation earlier massacred half of the population, ten million people.

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Update: In a comment to the Hungarian version Flora has called the attention to the New Caledonian football player Christian Karembeu who, when playing in the French national team, refused to sing the French hymn, because on the World’s Fair of 1931 one (or, in other sourcers, two) of his grand-uncles was/were exposed in the same way. The French Wikipedia also has the respective photo, which we include here.