Francis Joseph in Czernowitz

August 18 is the birthday of Francis Joseph, Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary. On this day, the Austro-Hungarian pilgrim house in Jerusalem hangs out on its façade the huge double Austro-Hungarian flag made in 1880, which was seen in 2014 in the Weltuntergang exhibition in Vienna, in the room dedicated to the Austro-Hungarian gunners fighting in the Holy Land. We, however, were able to pay tribute before the statue of the old monarch on this illustrious day only in the “Jerusalem along the Prut”, as Czernowitz was called in his day.


That a statue of Francis Joseph still stands in the capital of the former model Hapsburg province, Bukovina, in itself would be a sensation in the Ukraine, where hardly any monument from the “brave old world” has survived the Soviet regime. Especially not a statue of the ruler of a previous empire, if even that of John Sobieski, King of Poland, who had a much better renown as the scourge of the Turks, whose monument was exiled in 1945 from Lemberg, together with his people. The real sensation, however, is that this statue was erected not a century ago, but quite recently, in 2009. This shows how times are changing in Czernowitz, and how the nostalgia for pre-war Galicia, as the last golden age of the country, has taken over all of Western Ukraine.

Vlodko Kostyrko: Golden Galicia, 2009. From the exhibition Mythos Galizien, Vienna, 2015

The other special feature of the statue is that it was not erected by the city or by the Ukrainian government. Not even by an association, like the  “Verein zur Verschönerung der Stadt Czernowitz”, which in 1998 restored the memorial plaque of 1908 on the “Habsburghöhe” behind the university, originally dedicated to the 60th anniversary of Francis Joseph’s reign. But rather by a private citizen, on his own expense. Maybe for the reason that if the statue caused politically too great a scandal, the city could wash its hands of the matter. But also, if the bold gesture proved successful, it could bring significant political capital to the one who erected it. And this is what happened. The statue was erected by Arseny Yatsenyuk, the recently resigned president of the Ukrainian parliament, at his own expense, according to the inscription, “as a gift to the inhabitants of Czernowitz”, just before announcing his candidacy in the Ukrainian presidential elections, which he would win only five years later, in 2014, after the Kiev Revolution. Yatsenyuk comes from an old Czernowitz family, his father is a vice-dean in the university of the city, originally named after Francis Joseph, where he also graduated, thus the donation can be also considered as a gesture of a local patriot to his hometown. Nevertheless, the leaders of the local and provincial government, as well as the Austrian Embassador in Ukraine also participated in the inauguration of the statue on 3 October 2009. On that occasion, Yatsenyuk emphasized in his speech, that he was inspired “not by a nostalgia for the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, but the recognition of the achievements of the Empire”.

This statue can be also considered the restration of a previous monument. Until 1918, a few streets further south, in the so-called National Park stood the statue of Francis Joseph, which was the model of the sculptors the present one, Segei Ivanov and Volodymyr Tsisarik. The statue depicted the monarch not in a solemn, representative posture, but as a walking figure. This is how the citizens of Czernowitz saw him on his third and last visit to the city, in September 1880, when, after having participated on the Yom Kippur Day ceremony in the Great Synagogue, he traversed on foot the streets of the “Little Vienna” lying on the eastern border of the Empire, and he even spoke to passers-by, which increased in no small measure his popularity in the city’s historical memory. The modern monument omits the pedestal, thus allowing the emperor to mingle again with the passers-by.




The original statue was destroyed by the invading Romanian army. Later National Park was built over. Its area is now covered partly by the city stadium, and partly by Guzar Street. This is why the founders choose a nearby site for the new monument, the former Ferdinand Park next to the former Roman Catholic cathedral.

The choice of the site is full of significance. The church of the Heart of Jesus was built by the Jesuit order between 1891 and 1894. The Jesuits arrived in 1885 from Silesia, which at that time still belonged to Germany, while their provincial, Frank Eberhardt – after whom the street in front of the church was named by the grateful city – from Berlin. They undertook the pastoral care of the local Germans, who amounted to 80% of the city’s Catholic population, so this is the time when the earlier Catholic church, the Holy Cross on Main Street definitively became the “Polish church”. When later the secret clause of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact ceded Northern Bukovina to the Soviet Union, and in 1940, before Stalin took his share, Hitler “repatriated” the Bukovina Germans, the church lost its adherents, and the Soviet regime converted it into a state archive. Still today the stumps of the moulded steel supports of the shelves can be seen drilled into the walls.






The church was emptied after the change of regime, and in this year returned to the Catholic church. I just saw it first opened. Inside, a real abandoned places feeling receives us, with crumbling plaster and broken-down organ choir. However, the archival use preserved the church from the worst danger, the penetration of water and fungi. Not much is missing to make it again the Catholic cathedral of the city. And if they do so, the square will also revalorized, and the emperor’s statue will once again stand in a central place of Czernowitz.






That the square already plays an important role in the city’s memory is shown by the small “folk memorial” standing next to it. The wooden panels leaned against the cross decorated with fresh and artificial flowers and wreaths announce: “Here stood the chapel of St. Anthony, preacher of the Word of God from Italian Padua”. The 13th-century Portuguese Franciscan St. Anthony of Padua is still extremely popular in Catholic folk religion as the patron of lost things, affairs and people, of whom over the last century there were plenty in Czernowitz. This “substitute monument” is a remarkably Ukrainian genre. These are established when still there is no money for a real monument, but they already want to indicate the sanctity of the place. As the plaque in Simferopol which announces that “the Armenian church will be reborn here”, or the barely visible stone in the market place of Zhovkva, that “the Shevchenko monument will stand here”.


We line up in front of the emperor’s statue, we take selfies with him, which a century ago would have been impossible to the passers-by of Czernowitz, and not only for technical reasons. Then we congratulate him with the song “God, keep our emperor”, written by another Franz Josef, by family name Haydn. The modern passers-by of Czernowitz stop by, and listen benevolently to our veneration.


F. J. Haydn: Gott erhalte unsern Kaiser

Invisible cities. Czernowitz, where people and books lived

“A Czech architect who studied in Vienna and became immersed in the characteristics of Bukovinian folk architecture and art, builds up with the help of local Hutsul, Polish and Romanian craftsmen and artists the palace of the Romanian Orthodox Metropolite in Czernowitz – can you imagine a more convincing example of a mutual cross-fertilization of cultures?” (Martin Pollack: Mythos Czernowitz)

Czernowitz, wo Menschen und Bücher lebten. This is how Paul Celan, the great poet of Czernowitz remembers his native town, and it’s not sure which of the two is rarer and more flattering for a city. The easternmost large city of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy was created almost from nothing at the end of the 18th century, when Galicia and Bukovina became part of the Hapsburg empire. The Viennese government intended it from the beginning as a model city, where the representatives of all the nationalities of the Monarchy would harmoniously live with each other, united by the enlightened Hapbsburg government and the common German language. Each of the forty-two ethnic groups constituting the population of the city had their own social, religious and cultural institutions, societies, streets and newspapers, while they were proud that in all the empire, it was in Czernowitz where the most beautiful German was spoken. This diversity and unity of the city’s spirit was also reflected in its built texture, where the planned structure, the large public spaces and public buildings were in a harmonious balance with the quarters and institutions of the single nationalities.

This is the structure we will walk through on the next occasion of our “Invisible cities” series, on 17 September 4 p.m. in the FUGA Center of Architecture (Budapest, Petőfi Sándor u. 5.). In contrast to the previously examined cities, Prague and Tbilisi, Czernowitz became invisible not by destruction. Its old town still preserves its turn-of-the-century fabric virtually without change. Only its diverse and sophisticated culture disappeared, which had created this fabric and filled it with meaning. In our presentation we reconstruct this life and these meanings with the help of contemporary photos, descriptions and local press, thereby showing how Czernowitz indeed became a Hapsburg model city, and later a nostalgic “myth of Czernowitz”, still alive in the memory of its former inhabitants.

Purim in Czernowitz

In turn-of-the-century Czernowitz, the easternmost city of the Monarchy, the “little Vienna”, or, from another perspective, “Jerusalem on the Prut”, forty-two nationalities coexisted, thereby modeling on a small scale the diversity of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The paralel is even more fitting, because the city’s residents proudly declared, regardless of nationality: in all the Empire, the most beautiful German is spoken here. Indeed, after the disintegration of the Monarchy, those poets of the city who did not choose to write in the languages of the successor states, from Paul Celan through Rose Ausländer and Karl Emil Franzos to Gregor von Rezzorii, became great figures of German literature, before they also disappeared, and the city became Stadt der toten Dichter.

In turn-of-the-century Czernowitz, however, the individual nationalities aspired to develop not against each other, but side by side. The smaller ones – the Serbs, Greeks, Armenians, Bulgarians – traditionally had their cultural centers in their churches, merchant’s and boyar’s houses. The larger ones, however, after the turn of the century built their own Nationalhäuser, national houses of culture. First the Romanians, then the Poles, the Ruthenians, the Germans, and finally, in 1908, the Jews.


The Jüdisches Nationalhaus was built not far from the Town Hall, along the long promenade which first was called Fischplatz, and later, when all the squares of Czernowitz were named after the members of the Hapsburg dynasty, this one also was baptized Elisabethplatz. In 1904-1905, in the focus of the square was built the new pride of the city, the city theater, a work of the Viennese office Fellner and Helmer, who designed the fifty most representative theater buildings of contemporary Europe. The Jewish “national house”, standing in a highlighted place, next to the theater, was designed by an architect invited from Lemberg, T. Lewandowski, by repeating the acclaimed motif of the Fellner-Helmer theaters, the monumental column-arch-frame embracing several stores. But while the arch of the theater is only two stories high, that of the Jewish national house unites four stores, thereby actually stealing the show from the theater, and although it pulls aside, nevertheless it becomes the most spectacular building of the square.



Since the late 19th century, this area became the center of Reform Judaism, whose followers tried to assimilate and move upward into the city’s elite, by breaking with the traditional Orthodox center established much lower, in the Synagogengasse along the Prut river. The following postcard displays, to the right of the Nationalhaus, the large green dome of the Reform synagogue, the “Tempel”, and below it, the condition when the Fischmarkt was not yet reformed into a representative urban square. The Tempel is still standing today. Although in 1942 the Germans blew up its dome, they could not overcome its massive walls, so they left it to its fate. In Soviet times it was transformed into a movie theater, which is still functioning, so the Czernowitz slang refers to it as “the cinegoga”.




The Soviets also took over the Jewish national ouse, and they established here the textile workers union center. In order nothing should remind of the former builders, they removed all the six-pointed stars from the rich interior decoration of the building. Among other things, they sawed this central motif out of the iron railing of the stairs, whereby the stairs became dangerous. Only after 1990, when the building was returned to the three-thousand-strong Jewish community of Czernowitz, were the stars of David welded back into the railing, so now you can safely climb the stairs. But we do not need to do so, as on the higher stories there are only offices closed to us. The museum commemorating the Jewry of Czernowitz and Bukovina is on the ground floor, to the right of the entrance.

A prayer for Emperor Franz, 1792. In the Jewish Museum of Bukovina

In the two rooms of the museum we mainly find photographs about the former synagogues, cemeteries, and prominent members of the Jewish community. The few original objects include, in a glass case, this painted tin label, which appears to the untrained eye as an inn’s shop sign, as if the memory of an old fish restaurant returned here, to the former Fischmarkt.


However, Két Sheng gives a more accurate report on it:

No shop label, but a so-called Purim table or Adar table. Purim is celebrated on the 14th of Adar, and, as a joyful expectation to it, a table is usually hung in the Jewish houses on the eve of the first day of Adar, with this Hebrew inscription: “Adar is coming, joy is multiplying” (Talmud Bab., Tractate Taanit 29a.) This is what the upper, red-letter line says in the Czernowitz table (“Mi-she-nichnas adar marbin be-simha”). Traditionally, one or two fishes are also displayed on the table, because Adar stands in the sign of Pisces in the zodiac. This is written in the black-letter text of the table: “Adar, sign of Pisces” (“Adar mazal dagim”). The wine bottle to the right is an alternative complement to the composition, for at Purim it is a mitzvah [a meritorious deed] to drink so much that at the end one is unable to tell Haman from Mordecai. The Yiddish text on the bottle is especially gemütlich: “Lechaim, brider!”

“Reb Burech Bendit drinks lechaim”, not far from here, on the stage of the Yiddish theater of Czernowitz. See here

In the lower right corner of the table, there is a date: (5)687, which corresponds to the civil year of 1927. The lower left corner commemorates the artist’ name: Yitzhak Eisikowicz.

The table has two unusual features. First, that it was made of enameled metal, not paper, and second, that the appeal to drinking is particularly stressed in it. On this basis, and the emphasized date and signature, I suspect hat it might have been pending in a restaurant or wine shop.

Jewish restaurants and wine shops were plentiful in the hundred-thousand-strong Czernowitz, the Jerusalem on the Prut. To provide so many places with Purim tables at the beginning of Adar, and to refresh their shop signs during the year, might have given enough bread for a small painting company.

And the small company did exist. If we descend to the shore of the Prut, the old Synagogengasse, from where the Nationalhaus and the Tempel climbed up to the main square, we see a small house, in one row with the big Orthodox synagogue, the Jewish hospital, the mikveh and the Hassidic synagogue, which shows its importance. And on the facade of the house, you can read a ghost text which has survived the adversities of the century, with the same name as on the Purim table in the museum: “J. Eisikowicz signboard painter. Established in 1910”.

The fate has mysteriously selected what to preserve from the old Jewish Czernowitz.


Elmer Bernstein: Trinkt Le Chaim! (4'23") (From the film Thoroughly Modern Millie)

The Synagogengasse in Czernowitz around 1930, just when Yitzhak Eisikowicz painted the Purim table. The red dot marks the sidewalk in front of the Eisikowicz shop, behind which the Orthodox great synagogue rises. The street view has changed almost nothing in the last eighty years.

A cemetery in Bukovina

If, in visiting the Renaissance monasteries in Bukovina, you are heading from Rădăuți to Siret, and the road through Dornești – in the languages of its missing Hungarian and German inhabitans, Hadikfalva or Kriegsdorf – is under construction, you must turn north to Măneuți to reach the Ukrainian border.

The dirt road leads through spacious fields, across the fertile plains of the Suceava river. In the distance, not so far away, you can see the edge of the bowl from where you came down, the range of the Carpathians. To the right, the meandering line of the Suceava, accompanied by willow groves. Flocks of sheep graze on the floodplain. At the edge of the village, long before you reach the first houses, a small cemetery to the right. We stop.

The graves are oddly grouped in this cemetery. At the far end, nearst the village, where there is also a second gate, there are some rows of tombstones with Romanian inscriptions. Parallel to the road, two or three more rows of Romanian tombstones, very fresh ones. The largest central part of the cemetery is covered with tall grass. Concrete crosses emerge from the grass. On them, Hungarian inscriptions.



The crosses all look towards the road, they turn their backs on the village. The Romanian tombs on the other side face the village. It seems that the Romanians, who settled here after the war, began to use the side of cemetery opposite from the pre-war residents. This is what saved the crosses from destruction. They were overgrown with grass and scrub, and while those made of wood have certainly rotted away, nevertheless the great invention of the village, the reinforced concrete crosses cast in the 1920s and 1930s, have survived. By 1990s, they also started to use the side of the cemetery towards the road, and it was all cleaned up, but the times when it was usual to destroy the former Hungarian, German or Polish graves without a trace had by that time passed. Unlike the cemeteries of the other four Hungarian villages in Bukovina, Józseffalva, Hadikfalva, Istensegíts and Fogadjisten, that of Măneuți – Andrásfalva – has remained, as the only memento of the former Bukovina Székely settlements.


Two hundred fifty-two years ago today, on 7 January 1764 the Austrian imperial army started to fire cannons at the Hungarian Székelys gathered for the deliberation in Eastern Transylvanian Madéfalva (today Siculeni, Romania), because they refused to join the newly established Székely border regiments. Two hundred people died, thousands fled across the mountains to Moldavia, where they either increased the population of the Hungarian settlements in Gyimes and the Csángós of Moldavia, or scattered among the Romanian villages. When, ten years later, in 1774, Austria, in exchange for its neutrality in the Russian-Turkish war, obtained the northernmost region of the Turkish vassal Moldavia, from which they created the province of Bukovina, the new, Hungarian governor, General András Hadik noticed the large number of Hungarians living in the region, and collected them into five villages that were established for them.

In the fertile plains, the population of the villages rapidly grew, and the around ten thousand young people swarming from here from the 1880s onward established a number of new settlements, not only in Transylvania, but even in Canada and Brazil. However, their greatest journey started in 1941, when the Hungarian government resettled almost the entire population of the five villages to the fertile Bácska region, which in 1941 returned from Yugoslavia to Hungary. From there in 1944 they had to flee the Serbian partisans, up to Zala county in Transdanubia. Finally they were settled down in Tolna and Baranya counties, ironically in the houses of the displaced Swabians. Their long journey has been portrayed in the two-part film Sír az út előttem (The road is crying in front of me, 1987) by Sándor Sára.

And their former houses in Bukovina were occupied by Romanian refugees from Bessarabia, annexed in 1940 by the Soviet Union. Their Catholic churches were converted into Orthodox ones. Only a few Hungarians remained in the five villages. The descendants of the Bukovina Székelys living in Tolna, who have come here from time to time to put the Hungarian graves in order, met with them for the last time in the 1990s.



Two laments from Gyimes (Péter Hámori, Zsófia Lázár, 2006)