Luna Park


“The glittering, bustling, roaring Luna Park extended under them. The music, the noise and the shouting flied up to them at once, all it bombed together their ears. And above the many lights airplanes hanging from a high column were silently revolving in an already more obscure layer of the air which thus seemed more poetical.”
Raymond Queneau: Pierrot mon ami, 1942


“The opening of the huge fair extending as long as the Porte Maillot on 29 May 1909 attracted several thousands of spectators. Those curious of the American wonders could try for the first time the vertical Niagara Fall or the Grand Canyon panoramic railway, long before Gainsbourg and Elsa Triolet.”
Mikaël Hirsch: Omicron, 2007


The Luna Park of Paris was opened a hundred and one years ago for the large public. These photos were taken a hundred years ago, in 1910. They were first published two years ago on a Russian blog, and then I put them aside for the centenary. However, by the time the anniversary arrived, the blog closed down. Therefore now I publish the complete series again.


The fashion of the Luna Parks came from America. The first one was opened in 1903 on Coney Island. Its great attraction was the “airspace” called “Luna Travel” or “Traveling to the Moon” which gave name to the whole amusement park. Beginning with 1905 the Ingersoll company established a world wide network of Luna Parks, called “English Parks” in several places of Europe after their place of origin. But the original name “Luna Park” has also been kept and converted itself to the common equivalent of “amusement park” in several languages.


The Luna Park of Paris stood at the Maillot Gate. Its main attractions included the Niagara Falls, the so-called Russian (or American) mountains, the diabolic wheel, the Enchanted Palace. They were all faithfully copied also in the World Expo of Roubaix in 1911 whose photo documentation was left to us. In 1914 a great dance hall opened here as well under the direction of Duque from Brasil. Duque, a dentist had come to Paris as a traveling agent of medicine, but there he discovered that exotic dances were selling much better. This is how he started to teach “the true Brasilian tango” or „maxixe” which became the most popular dance of pre-war Paris.



“I will not go into details as to the trade, but there are days when we sell a hundred thousand entrance tickets. Twenty attractions keep drawing the visitors, and then I do not even mention the lotteries, the games of manual skills, the shooting galleries which are mainly situated there, between the Alpine Coaster and the Dance Palace, you see, there next to the crossing of Chaillot Avenue and Drop Street. But the main entrance is here, in front of us, at the corner of the External boulevard and Chaillot Avenue.”
Raymond Queneau: Pierrot mon ami, 1942


As a result of the war and of the Great Depression, the traffic of the Luna Park has remarkably decreased. In 1931 they exhibited, as a last great sensation, a hundred living penguins as well as a complete embalmed whale, for the first time in the history of European amusement parks. Although this spectacle could not save the Luna Park, it has created a myth in European literature which has been obstinately embodied again and again from Eduardo Mendoza’s La ballena to László Krasznahorkai’s and then Béla Tarr’s The melancholy of resistance.


The park, after being for thirty years an indispensable spot of Paris, closed its gates in 1937. For ten years it stood empty, almost as its own ghost, inspiring such nostalgic works as Raymond Queneau’s Pierrot mon ami or Maigret’s first post-war novel, Maigret in retirement whose plot takes place in this district and involves some employees of the Luna Park. Finally in 1948 it was pulled down. Today the Palais des Congrès stands on its place.


Small carousel:




Balloon sellers:




Big wheel and airship:



American tower:



Russian swan boats:


Children’s railway:


Shooting gallery:


Little girl with the piggy bank won at shooting:


Seller of paper windmills:


Seller of paper flowers:


Puppet show:


Street scales:


Moving movie ads:


Show in the open-air theatre:






The employees of the Luna Park cooking lunch:


Luna-Park est ma réserve de gaieté
A tous les stands je suis salué
Des patrons et des habitués
Garçons et filles
C' est ma famille
Partout ailleurs je n' suis rien
A Luna Park je suis quelqu' un
Vive Luna Park et vive la joie.
My share of joy is in the Luna Park
where I am greeted at every stand
by the staff and the visitors
the boys and the girls
this is my family
anywhere else I am nobody
only in the Luna Park I am somebody:
long live the Luna Park and long live joy.



Lucus a non lucendo

Gyula Benczúr: Kálmán Mikszáth (1910)

Kálmán Mikszáth (1847-1910), one of the greatest 19th-century Hungarian novelists was also a keen politician, a respected parliamentary representative, a pleasant man of society and an extremely fertile journalist. The vibrant liveliness of the thousands of his feuilletons is greatly enhanced by the innumerable references taken from the most various contemporary sources, from daily political skirmishes (which in those times were no less disgusting than today) through well-informed gossips to advertisements: he wove the texture of his texts like the mayfly larva constructs its multicolored and unique house from the most heterogeneous materials to be found on the bottom of the lake. To contemporary readers these memes were just as comprehensible as King Juan Carlos’ “Why don’t you shut up?” or “the coffee of Zapatero” are to us. But nowadays for a complete understanding of that complex and vivid background we need a half page of footnotes to each line of Mikszáth. And such footnotes which restore to life a bygone world are often just as delightful as the lines they expose.

Here is for example the introduction of the 1885 article “Sasok” [Eagles]:

If one lives for about nine years in Pest, he begins to hear about the “eagles”. (If only for eight years then not yet.) First he believes they speak about the eagles in the zoo, but in nine years there will surely arrive a lazy moment when he might ask: well, what are those eagles? And then he will hear the following explanation:
– Well, the eagles, my lord, are a company ruling in the affairs of the city. They are the most powerful ones around. They all are good friends, twenty bodies with one soul, because they number at least twenty. (Jesus Mary! A twenty-headed eagle!) By the way, they are the bravest old gentlemen who still care for public affairs. Pál Királyi is their head.
– What, the old Pál Királyi? I would have never believed him to bear the nickname of “eagle”. “Lucus a non lucendo.” Where did they take this name from?
– From the Golden Eagle Hotel.
– Aha! That makes sense. But I have to confess that first I have thought of the zoo.
And if one lives for nine more years here, he will perfectly forget about this dialogue and about the eagles as well, because Budapest has this peculiarity that it is unable to assimilate you. You can live here from the age of ten to ninety, and yet you will always feel like a traveler in transit. This is an ill presage, gentlemen. I’m afraid it will never become a metropolis.

Let us now pass over the still today threatening prophecy of Mikszáth, and let us rather focus on the philological problems. Concerning the “eagles” and their connection with the Golden Eagle Hotel – as well as the whereabouts of the long forgotten Golden Eagle Hotel itself – it would not be difficult to write an exhaustive footnote on the basis of Balázs Draveczky’s article in the 1998 edition of the Tanulmányok Budapest múltjából (Studies from the past of Budapest).

The Golden Eagle – Arany Sas – Hotel was an illustrious inn of the old Pest before city planning in the 1890s, following the example of Hausmann’s Paris, cut a never healing wound in the romantic texture of the little medieval streets of the inner town with the sharp sword of modern Lajos Kossuth street – an act which in Budapest was euphemistically labeled “urbanism”, but in Rome, where the same happened  some years later, was much more frankly called “sventramento”, that is “disemboweling” of the city. The new street also swept away the Golden Eagle Hotel which until 1893 stood at the corner of the Neue-Welt-Gasse (marked on the 19th-century map as “gold. Adler”). On its place was built the National Casino which between 1945-1990 fuctioned as the Palace of Soviet Culture (running a fantastic Russian and Georgian restaurant – mmm…)


The street network of the inner city of Budapest in the 19th century and now. The building of the central avenue around 1900 has swept away the historical center of the city,
of which some photos are published here

The inn standing inside the old city walls (whose traces are still to be discovered in the inner courtyards of some of the houses along the old Land-Strasse or modern Múzeum körút), immediately at the gate, was the favorite hotel and restaurant of the countryside nobility visiting the capital as well as of the civil servants of the County Hall at the opposite side of the street. It was a small Hungarian island in the then overwhelmingly German core of Pest, regularly visited by the most renowned writers, poets and politicians of the age. Some since then typical plates of the Hungarian restaurant menu were invented here – like székelykáposzta, inspired by journalist and archivist József Székely, or palócleves which was composed precisely in honor of Mikszáth by János Gundel, the founder of one of the most renowned dynasties of chefs in Budapest. The Golden Eagle was also immortalized in several works of Gyula Krúdy, the unsurpassable chronicler of the cuisine of fin-de-siècle Budapest.

The Golden Eagle was also home of several illustrious table societies. The most eminent of them was that of the Eagles, founded in the 1870s and described in the 1930s by the renowned chef and cuisine author Elek Magyar as “the academy of all table societies in Pest”. Its members belonged to the parties of opposition, including several eminent figures of the anti-Hapsburg war of independence of 1848-49 like Pál Királyi, chief editor of the opposition journal Jelenkor. The society also included two important Mayors of Budapest, Károly Ráth, the founder of the society, and Károly Kamermayer, the great builder of fin-de-siècle Budapest who resigned of his position in the same year when the Golden Eagle was pulled down. Thus it was no wonder that the Eagles also had a considerable influence on the affairs of the city.

All right, the golden and other eagles have been checked off. But what about the idiom “Lucus a non lucendo”?

This phrase enriches the texture of Mikszáth’s text with one more layer of contemporary life, that of the adages collected during high school classical curriculum and frequently applied in everyday conversation. Its literal meaning is “forest from not shining”. But its real meaning will be clear only if we know that it was attributed to Quintilian who mocked the convoluted etymologies of his age by telling that these even derive ‘forest’ [lucus] from ‘shining’ [luceo], because the forest does not shine.

However, the precise locus of Quintilian sounds somewhat different. He formulates it like this in chapter 1.6.34 of his Institutio Oratoria:

etiamne a contrariis aliqua sinemus trahi, ut „lucus” quia umbra opacus parum luceat, et „ludus” quia sit longissime a lusu, et „Ditis” quia minime dives?

and sometimes we even accept the derivation of words from their contrary, like ‘forest’ [lucus] from the fact that its dense leaves do not let sunshine in [luceat], like ‘school’ [ludus] from the lack of playing [lusus], and the name of Dis [Pluto, the god of the nether world] from his not being rich [dives].

The formula lucus a non lucendo – as the excellent blog of classical etymologies Laudator Temporis Acti points it out – first occurred only in Virgil’s 4th-century commentator Servius, whose work became an essential reference work for the Middle Ages. Servius comments the name of the Parcae in Aeneis 1.22 in the following way:

et dictae sunt parcae kata antiphrasin, quod nulli parcant, sicut lucus a non lucendo, bellum a nulla re bella.

They are called parcae “kata antiphrasin” [in the contrary sense], as they have no mercy [parco], just like the name of ‘forest’ [lucus] comes from not shining [luceo], and that of ‘war’ [bellum] from the fact that it is absolutely not beautiful [bellus].

Servius’ authority proved stronger than Quintilian’s irony. As Henri de Lubac points it out in his monumental Exégèse médiévale: les quatre sens de l'Écriture, the method kata antiphrasin became an accepted etymological principle under the technical name aetymologia ex contrariis, thus paving the way to modern psychoanalysis where a symbol can also refer to the contrary of itself. Alanus ab Insulis for example explains in his De planctu naturae (PL 210.459d) written in the late 12th century:

Lucifer… qui cum totus sit tenebrosus, tamen per antiphrasin dictus est Lucifer, sicut lucus a non lucendo quia minime lucet.

Lucifer, who is completely dark, is called ‘light-bearer’ by the principle of contraries, just like lucus a non lucendo, that is the forest from being absolutely non-shining.

This much-traveled Latin phrase is also used in this sense in the above dialog by Mikszáth when he hears that Pál Királyi, the former officer of the war of independence, the chief editor of a journal of opposition and the president of the National Party is called an ‘eagle’. Lucus a non lucendo? And by telling this he refers, after the eagles in the zoo, the Golden Eagle, and the table society of the Eagles, to a fourth meaning of the word ‘eagle’, a meaning which is unspoken but is clear to everyone: the Doppeladler, the two-headed Hapsburg eagle.

“Magyarisches Golgotha”. Cartoon in the journal Musketen

Hero Cats



The heraldic animal of Yaroslavl is the bear (click). Nevertheless, the city is famous for its cats. To two of them, our Muska and Lena’s Yoshka we have already raised a monument more lasting than bronze here on this blog. But a bronze monument was also raised to the cats of Yaroslavl, exactly ten years ago, on 25 January 2000.


The bronze cat sits enthroned at one of the most distinguished sites of Saint-Petersburg, on the Malaya Sadovaya front of the beautiful Art Nouveau Elisseeff Emporium – the Elisseeff family, now living in emigration, prefers this spelling instead of the phonetic Yeliseyev –, which was built in 1903 on the Nevsky Prospekt and has maintained its original function for more than a century. The tomcat is called Yelisey after the house.


The Elisseeff Emporium in 1904 seen from the Nevsky Prospekt (the side street is the Malaya Sadovaya)

On the opposite side of the Malaya Sadovaya, on the front of the house number 3 there is Yelisey’s girlfriend Vasilisa purring. This statue was placed there some months later so that Yelisey should not feel alone.


The date of the statue’s erection on 25 January was not accidental: it was a part of festive preparations. In fact, on 27 January the city celebrated the 57th anniversary of Leningrad’s liberation from the almost 900 days long siege, the “Блокада”, in the course of which six hundred thousand inhabitants of the city perished of bombs, diseases and hunger.


Diary of twelve years old Tanya Savicheva in which she noted down the death of all the members of her family between 28 December 1941 and 30 May 1942.

And as if the siege and famine were not enough, the city was also afflicted by an unprecedented invasion of rats that spread epidemics and devoured everything they found. According to the memories of the survivors they advanced in organized troops, sometimes covering in black whole streets. A witness related this in the 5 February 1997 edition of Труд:

…тьма крыс длинными шеренгами во главе со своими вожаками двигались по Шлиссельбургскому тракту прямо к мельнице, где мололи муку для всего города. В крыс стреляли, их пытались давить танками, но ничего не получалось: они забирались на танки и благополучно ехали на них дальше. Это был враг организованный, умный и жестокий.

The rats marched in long, black rows behind their leaders along the Shlisselbourg avenue, right to the mills where flour was ground for the whole city. People shot on the rats, they tried to trample on them with tanks, but in vain: they climbed on the tanks and marched on unshakably. They were an organized, clever and cruel enemy.

After every human attempt failed, there remained only one hope left – the cats. The city council wrote for help to Yaroslavl which, as everyone knows, has the best mouse-catching cats in all Russia. And the help arrived. When the Red Army finally broke through the siege, the greatest gift they brought with themselves along food were four wagons of cats from Yaroslavl.


The Yaroslavl cats soon cut heavily into the hosts of rats, and they forced them back to a great extent. However, the final victory was achieved with the contribution of a new supply of cats that arrived some months after the end of the siege – this time from Siberia.

The cats for Leningrad, the “Hero City” were offered both in Yaroslavl and then in Siberia just like war loans. Announcements called upon help for the much-suffered city, and people who two years earlier enlisted their sons for soldiers now stood in queues to offer their cats to Mother Russia. In Tomsk on the first day they enlisted 238 cats from the age of six months to five years for the aid of Leningrad. According to the registers at the end of 1943 only from Omsk, Tomsk and Irkutsk there were five thousand cats fighting on the rat front of Leningrad – with full success.

And the people of Leningrad accommodated each cat with a family which adopted them. The long-haired, banner-tailed, tiger-statured cats of Saint-Petersburg are the offsprings of these liberators. The bronze statues of Yelisey and Vasilisa, placed for the anniversary at the two fronts of the Malaya Sadovaya street on the suggestion of historian S. B. Lebedev, are raised to their memory.

Petersburg rumour has it that whoever throws a coin on the pedestal of Yelisey will see one of his wishes fulfilled. This, however, is not as simple as it sounds, as Yelisey keeps scanning the city traffic from the height of the second floor. Recently the metal pedestal was changed for a fiberglass one, perhaps to prevent any doubt. Since then every inhabitant of Pityer can see whether his throw has hit and he has found favor with the city-protecting cat.