Treasures

I bought this book in Tabriz, just one corner from that church at the bazaar which was already described by Marco Polo. We were accompanied to the church by an unknown old-fashioned Azeri gentleman with little laughing wrinkles in the corner of his eye, whom we approached for directions on the street. The church was closed so that we could not enter, but a very kind elder Azeri woman offered us exquisite Tabriz chocolate in the courtyard. Tabriz is the capital of chocolate as we experienced it in the neighboring confectionery where, while we were having a chat with the pastry-cook, two beautiful local girls praised me for my beard. I don’t know whether they did so because I wore beard like good Muslims, or, on the contrary, because I had cut it short unlike they.

Treasures in the bazaar of Tabriz

And as if so many treasures found were not enough for a morning, in the bookshop – where we had a long conversation with the extremely intelligent young shopkeeper – I found just this volume entitled Gench-hâ, that is “Treasures” of the series Bâstân-shenâsi (Science of antiquity), introducing with several pictures and well-written concise texts to schoolboys the most remarkable treasures of the world, from those of the Pharaons, of the Scythians and of Troy through those of the pirates, of the Great Armada and of the Titanic to the Aztec golden statues and the treasures robbed by the German army. But Tabriz, with the characteristic generosity of Iranian hosts, managed to add in this volume even to all the treasures of the world two extra treasures that only a Hungarian guest can properly appreciate.

The first one is the title of the book itself. If we omit the -hâ sign of the plural, we get the word gench, which is identical in meaning and similar in sound to Hungarian kincs (pronounced kinch), and even more to its Medieval form kench.

kincs 1213/1550: ? „Iudice Paulo curiali cõite de Bichor, pristaldo Boncy, Cunsudu portato ferro cum solui deberet”, sz. szn. (VárReg. 153.); 1291-4: ? Kuncheý sz. hn. (MNy. 22: 222); 1301: Kynchus sz. hn. (Györfy 1: 731); 1358-9: Kenches sz. hn. (MNy. 16: 38); 1372 u./1448 k.: „kyt en aloytok nagÿ kencznek holot semmÿ” (JókK. 130). J: 1. 1213/1550: ? ’(felhalmozott) anyagi érték, ingó vagyontárgy, értékes, becses valami vagy valaki; Schatz’ (l. fent), 1372 u./1448 k.: ’ua.’ (l. fent); 2. 1416 u./1466: ’kincstár; Schatzkammer’ (MünchK. 40). – Sz: ~es 1301: hn. (l. fent); 1495 e. kinLos hazaba (GuaryK. 111) | ~ez 1416 u./1450 k.: kenLeznèc gr. ’kincset gyűjt, szerez’ (BécsiK. 219). —— Ismeretlen eredetű. 2. jelentésében a lat. thesaurus ’kincs; kincstár’ tükörszava. – Iráni és török származtatása nem fogadható el, a kéj ~ kény szóval való egybekapcsolása is téves. —— CzF.; Vámbéry: NyK. 8: 188; Munkácsi: NyK. 17: 97, 28: 267, 29: 20, AkÉrt. 5: 133, KSz. 1: 242, ÁKE. 412; Miklosich: TENachtr. 1: 74; Asbóth: NyK. 34: 106; Tagányi: MNy. 20: 138; Sköld: UngJb. 5: 435; Melich: AkNyÉrt. 25/4: 35; Fokos: Balassa-Eml. 56; Rásonyi Nagy: UngJb. 15: 551; Horger: MNy. 33: 247, 36: 322; SzófSz.; Kardos: MNyTK. 82. sz. 55. – Vö. köz~.

When checking the roots of the Hungarian word in the A magyar nyelv történeti-etimológiai szótára (Historical-etymological dictionary of the Hungarian language, 1977), there we read: Of unknown origin, and somewhat later: Its Iranian and Turkish etymology is unacceptable. But this affirmation itself seems to be unacceptable, as almost all the great names in the following bibliography stand up for the Iranian and/or Turkish etymology of the word. The names of the Western Hungarian village Gencsapáti and the Eastern Hungarian village Gencs (this latter now in Romania) are both officially said to come from the Iranian/Old Turkish word ‘genj’ = ‘treasure’, and the authoritative Ókori lexikon (Lexicon of Ancient Scholarship) also writes about the name of the Iranian city of Gaza, where the treasure of the Persian kings used to be conserved: “it comes from Sanskrit gandsha, that is treasure, like New Persian gendsh, which gave origin to Old Hungarian gench, treasure.” (This Iranian word is also the root of the Hebrew genizah, of the attic of the synagogue where the manuscripts including the name of God are being accumulated in the course of the centuries, and Dávid Kaufmann could say a lot about what a great treasure this is.) Such bias is a sad, but characteristic feature of this great dictionary of Hungarian etymology, compiled by “hardcore” Finno-Ugrist academicians who will do anything but recognize the Turkish or Iranian roots of “a word of unknown origin”. This has been eloquently and bitterly set forth by Hasan Eren, head of the department of Hungarology at the University of Ankara, honorary member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and redactor of the great Turkish dictionary of etymology, in his recension written about the Hungarian dictionary.

But another, much bigger surprise is the other extra treasure to which the book dedicates a special place on the two pages written about the treasures dragged off by the Nazis from the occupied countries.


“The crown of Hungary (Tâdj-e Madjâristân). Among the treasures found in the repository of Merkers, there was also the ancient crown of one of the Hungarian kings, Saint Stephen (Santestefan pâdishâh-e Madjâristân) who died in 1031. Before it got to the hands of the Nazis (nâzi-hâ), several kings of Hungary wore it on their heads.”

True, Saint Stephen died in 1038, but let the first stone be cast on the author by him who can tell the year of the death of King Dareios or Shah Great Abbas with the accuracy of at least one century. This little illustrated description appeared in a popular series, published in a high number of copies in Iran, where everyone we met could tell what the capital of Hungary was. Raise your hand if you have already heard about the Peacock Throne which is of the same importance for Persians, or if you know that the diamond called in Persian Koh-i-Nur, ‘the Mountain of Light’ – the largest one in the world at its times – adorned the crown of Persian rulers before it fell in 1877 into the hands of another occupying army, and from there into that “repository” of London where it has been preserved till our days, the Buckingham Palace.

Russian first

As Wang Wei discovered the Western borderland of Russian language in Catalonia, so we discovered the Eastern borderland of the same language in Persia.

In Persia one can more or less get by with English. With Persian one can settle more difficult cases as well. But hearts can be really opened only with Russian.

From Tehran through Isfahan to Shiraz we were asked in the most unexpected sites: Po-russki govoritye? (And you speak in Russian too?) Each time they asked it like a child who reveals a secret treasure, a rare and precious stamp, desirous to see the other appreciating it. The positive answer was greeted with a shining smile, and then a long, warm conversation followed in Russian. The people who asked it of us were Armenians and Azeris who are just as numerous in Iran as in the former Soviet republics of Armenia and Azerbaijan. The life stories told to us revealed that they have always moved with more or less freedom between the two empires, and the Russian language brought with them from the other side of the border enabled them to rise above the status of their own minority languages, to emphasize their otherness and to proudly display their connections with that large world over the borders.

It is always a peculiar experience to speak in Russian with non-Russians. When speaking in English, German, Italian, Spanish or any other idiom, it always remains clear that this is not my own language. It is a neutral intermediary language that is perhaps a pleasure for the other to hear, and perhaps I too can convincingly use it, but it always remains something extraneous to me. Russian, however, creates fellowship, recalls childhood remembrances, revives the memory of the films, books and jokes widely known in all the bygone empire, evokes the experience of that once common world. It creates such a closeness between a Hungarian and an Armenian in Iran which would not be possible either in English or in Persian. And not only in Iran. I had the same experience when speaking with a Bulgarian professor in Mallorca, a Polish cyclist in San Marino, a Georgian diamond dealer on the Madrid-Brussels flight, or an Uzbek innkeeper in Vienna.

In Tehran we were asked in the eating-house of the market at Hafez Street by a woman vested in black chador at the neighboring table whether we can speak Russian. She related us, by fumbling the words learned in her childhood, that her parents were Azeris from the “other” Azerbaijan over the border, and they sometimes also spoke in Russian at home. In an outburst of joy she ordered for us a dish that does not figure on the menu and is only taken by locals: tah dig, the crunchy crust at the bottom of the pan after rice has been steamed.

In Shiraz the Azeri assistant of the milk bar who was just smugly replying to our questions, was all of a sudden transformed into a human being when we changed the conversation to Russian. He turned out to have worked as a confectioner in both Azerbaijans, the Iranian and the Soviet ones. Azeris are great pastry-cookers. Their capital, Tabriz is full of patisseries that almost equal to those in Vienna, and most sweet-shops are in their hands all over Iran.

In Isfahan the guardian of the Armenian cathedral of Vank warned me that it was forbidden to take photos inside the church. Later, when listening to the strange idiom of our conversation he asked us whether we also understood Russian, and as we turned out to be Hungarians, he immediately recalled some Hungarian acquaintances (“István from the Ikarus bus factory”), after which taking photos was absolutely no problem.

In Tehran, on Sunday morning four Armenian men were talking away the time in the porter’s lodge of the Sarkis Cathedral. We inquired them in Persian about where we could find a Catholic mass. When they found out from where we were, the eldest of them turned the conversation to Russian, and in this language he explained us where the Catholic church was (albeit he turned out to have been misinformed, as he pointed us to the Orthodox chapel of the Greek embassy). The other three men were watching him with deep reverence. He accompanied us quite to the entrance of the church, where he asked me in a low voice about when I had been the last time in Moscow. Some ten years ago, I said. And how is Moscow like? It developed a lot, it grew much more beautiful, I said. Slava Bogu, he said, but he was not able to tell anything else, his voice faltered with sobbing.

However, our most peculiar Russian encounter in Persia was such a beautiful round story that I will have to dedicate a separate post to it in the following days.


In my childhood in Hungary it was considered a sort of resistance not to learn the language of the occupiers. Russian was an obligatory subject from the age of eight or ten until the university degree, but after twelve or fifteen years of studies most people could not tell much more than “Alyosha idyot v kino” (Alyosha goes to movie). My mother, when seating my brothers and sisters to do their homework, always released the slogan: “Russian first!”, knowing well that they would cut it with the best conscience.

I had a different moral problem with Russian. I already at the age of seven loved Russian, the strange letters, the romantic illustrations of the cheap brochures of fables sold in the Gorky bookshop, the world of floppy-eared bear Misha, Cheburashka and Crocodile Gena, but most of all that curious alchemy by which I was able, by coupling foreign words and affixes, to tell the same like in Hungarian but in a different way, which has ever since fascinated me in each language again and again. But am I allowed to learn the language of the invaders in a good faith?

I turned with my doubts to my father who told me that Russian was not only the language of the Soviet army, but that of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky as well. With this approval I happily threw myself into the study of Russian. And thanks to this, I have since then discovered that Russian is not only the language of these great authors, but that of small people as well, and not only of Russians but, in an odd way, of many different people from Bulgaria to Beijing and from Poland to Iran, organized into a kind of a community by virtue of this intermediary language. And in this way it is also mine.

Persian Food

Persia therefore came to Wang Wei. And in truth, for whoever has seen the menu of this restaurant in Barcelona, has seen that of all the restaurants of Persia.

Persian kitchen is one of the most majestic, most generous, most refined, most enchanting kitchens of the world. It is rustic like Turkish kitchen, sophisticated like French, spicy like Arabic, regionally diversified like Italian, satisfying like Spanish, and so light that there is nothing comparable to it in all Europe. As a matter of fact, it can only be compared in all respects to Chinese kitchen. This is well known to everybody who has not yet been to Persia and only knows its kitchen from literature, from the menu of the classy Persian restaurants in Western Europe and from cook books. Like us.

Before our travel we lived for months in the spell of Persian kitchen. We dreamed about Persian restaurants, we cooked from Eckel’s Persian cook book (fabulously), and I have memorized the twenty-three pages of Turner’s Persian thematic dictionary on food, dishes and spices.

It was unnecessary.

During the passage over lake Van we questioned with excitement our new friend Peyman about what kind of menu is in store for us at the other shore, in the dining car of the Persian train. He meditated for a while, perhaps in order not to omit anything, and then he told: “Kebab, kebab and kebab.”

For one day in the dining car, it’s all right. But for three weeks in all the available restaurants of a whole country it wore us out.

One of the oddest experiences in Iran is that there are hardly any restaurants. The few existing ones with their pseudo-oriental furnishings apparently address western tourists and local snobs. But even of this kind there are really few, the fewest possible you can imagine. In the most touristic city, Isfahan for example only one, the Bastani restaurant at the corner of the main square. And even these ones serve principally kebab. The desperate tone of the “Eating” sections in the Lonely Planet Iran guide reflects well the seriousness of the case.

Besides – or rather in spite of – the proper restaurants there are also restaurant-like public canteens where the workers and employees of the neighborhood take a quick kebab for lunch (for example the میخک Mikhak, that is Glove on the other corner of the main square of Isfahan, with high prices and tasteless dishes), and in the most popular places of excursion and parks there are some restaurants that are only open on the weekend, that is on Friday. Among these latter – especially in such fashionable places like Darband above Tehran – there are most probably some sophisticated ones as well that are visited by the élite of the city for tasting the authentic Persian kitchen. We have seen such places in the movies. In real life, however, we had no luck to discover them. The menu of the place where we ate on Friday evening clearly attested that the chef is out of practice in the other six days of the week. And of course there was only kebab. The vegetarian Ana from Madrid whom we met in the last day of their travel had lived for three weeks exclusively on cooked rice and mixed salad prepackaged in plastic boxes, and in spite of all my Persian eloquence and the waiter’s Persian benevolence they could not serve her anything else for this last supper either.

Although this situation was quite unexpected, nevertheless it was somehow familiar to us, for – like many other things in Iran – it excited the very vivid feeling as if we flew back to the socialist Hungary of the 70’s and 80’s. I still remember how rare the restaurants and the occasions of going to restaurant were in those years. People took their dinner at home – and moreover so gorgeous dishes that even today cannot be found on any menu, like potatoes seasoned with paprika, boiled shredded marrow or stuffed cabbage –, and in those seldom occasions (principally formal ones like a banquet, a wedding or a funeral) when they happened to find themselves in a restaurant, they too ate the equivalent of kebab as it was proper: Wiener schnitzel or cutlets. Such meat, besides having the high status of festive food, was also the easiest to prepare and the most difficult to spoil. I do not know whether it was the dictatorship and the concomitant withdrawal of people to their family circles, the poverty, or the disappearance of the middle classes that shaped this Budapest out of the city of cafés and restaurants like it was between the two wars; probably all these together, just like in the cities of Iran. I’m really curious to what extent people went to restaurant in Franco’s Spain, for example.

But Socialist experiences also had their benefits. I remember how much routine we picked up in the eighties in the localization of the so-called “little dirties” and “pits”, marketplace eateries and hash-houses. This routine was quite well applicable in Iran (just like some years earlier in pre-boom China), for both the structure and arrangement of these “little dirties” is very similar to those in the Hungary of the eighties. They can be found in the markets, in the small alleys around the large “canteen-restaurants” or in the vaults of the bazaars; they are mostly set up for regular local clients, are never larger than a few square meters, and they only cook one or two dishes, but those are majestic. And not kebab. Most tourists would avoid such suspicious places in fright, but whoever enters is greeted with joy, interrogated with the spontaneousness so characteristic of Persians, and entertained liberally. And just like we did in the eighties, present-day Persian intelligentsia also inquires for such places in a programmatic way. Quite similarly to how Endre Lábass and Ferenc Bodor wrote about the inns of Budapest in those times, the excellent tehranavenue.com regularly reports about recent findings in Tehran.

In Isfahan we have found such a noname small cook-shop with two tables just some steps from the above said Bastani restaurant. They only cooked one single dish, beryân, lamb cut in small pieces then cooked and fried, accompanied with the obligatory fragrant, mint-like green reyhân – it was fabulous. At departure the chef accepted with gratitude my eulogies on the dish, while the old woman waiting for our place enunciated with her pointing finger lifted, like the lesson of a long life: “Iranian food is very good.” Yes, if someone is lucky enough to finally find it.

In Tabriz near hotel Kousar there was a small place where they also sold one single dish: cooked potatoes with boiled eggs that everyone had to break, spice and roll in a thin flat bread himself. It is easy to prepare and it leaves enough room for you to reply the questions of the other guests.

In Tehran under the bazaar there is a secret eating-place for the merchants. It is true that on the south-western main street of the bazaar a small green board advertises the name of a “Restaurant Soleiman” (in Farsi only), but even he who takes notice of it cannot but helplessly stand, as behind the board there is a textile shop. You have to cross the shop, and then cross a second shop as well, opening at the right side of the first one, while at the end of the second one there is a staircase leading downstairs, apparently to some storehouse. But if you even have the courage to go down, then you will find a superb little eating-place downstairs with eight or ten chosen good dish and friendly sellers. We would have not found it if there were not Ahmad, the hawker – “call-in-man” – of the nomad carpet shop who willingly guided us to the green board, where we found him after the dinner patiently waiting for us to buy something of him as well. And in fact, we did.

However, the day is carried by the small hash-house on the vegetable market at the upper end of Hafez street in Tehran, not far from the Hafez bookshop also indicated in the Lonely Planet guide. Here it is apparent that we are already in the more elegant part of Tehran, because they sell a number of typical Persian food we have hitherto only encountered in the cook book. Nevertheless, prices are not remarkably higher than in other similar places: for two persons we have paid 3-4000 tomans, that is about 3 euros all in all for two dishes with meat per head, accompanied with reyhân, cooked tomatos and fermented yogurt drink, duq. If the foreigner does not protest in time, he will also receive a bottle of Coca-Cola which, in spite of the American embargo, is bottled in Kerman.

But it seems that the authentic Persian kitchen, similarly to the Hungarian one of the eighties, can only be tasted by those invited for a family dinner. We were not that lucky. Nevertheless, when in the last days we complained about Iranian restaurant food to the receptionist of our hotel, Mr. Mousavi, he could not permit the honor of Persian kitchen to be damaged, and offered to us that in the two evenings left it would be his wife to cook for us, and he would serve it for us in the hotel. And it happened so. In the first evening we had a magnificent vegetarian dinner (what a pity that Ana already could not taste it), while on the second evening, the last one before our departure, we were served the crown of Persian kitchen: fesenjân, chicken prepared in sauce of walnut and pomegranate.

If any Persian reads this post, hereby I announce well in advance that in April we are going to go to Persia again, this time together with Wang Wei. We both feel a great respect of good kitchen, and both are grateful guests.