Poemas del río Wang

All Souls' Day

Pokrovskaya Church, Budyonny village (called so between 1919 and 1958 after Marshall Semyon Mikhailovich Budyonny, before 1919 and since 2007 Biryuch), Streletskoe district, under Voronezh, next to the front of Don. From the war photos of Tamás Konok Sen., Fortepan

In the hitherto unknown diary of Ensign Elemér Tóth, written from the Hungarian Jászberény to the Russian Budyonny between 21 October and 4 December 1942 – which we have recently found among auction material, and about which we would like to write more – we read on Monday, 2 November:

“The whole afternoon was free. To use this little free time, we went out to the city to take photos. We photographed the Orthodox church, which was converted into a joiner-shop by the Soviets. Once it must have been a beautiful building, now it is in ruins. Our road leads next to two soldiers’ graves, with steel helmet on the cross. I go and look closely, and I read the following inscriptions on them: Here lies Corporal László Kőszegi, born on 5 August 1912, died for the homeland on 8 October 1942; and: Here lies Private Péter Nyolgas (sic!), born on 27 May 1921, died on 27 September 1942. We stop at the grave, we say an Our Father, and we go on. It is only four past half, but it is already getting dark, we hurry home.”

The concise, but sensitive description is unexpectedly paired with a photo, taken in the same place by war correspondent Tamás Konok Sen., about whom we have already written in detail. And, together with the laconic death records, the mosaic tiles of a whole story unfold. László Kőszegi, in civilian life, a butter-maker, resides at Nagymező Street 62, Budapest, just a few blocks and seven decades away from where I first consulted this diary. Péter Nyolcas from Jászladány, occupation unknown. Both of them lie in “Budenyj, next to the church”.

Tamás Konok’s photo of the grave mentioned in the diary

Corporal László Kőszegi, Pázmánd (Fejér county), 5 August 1912 – Budyonny, 8 August 1942. Cause of death: “during the performance of his duty he fell in the water and drowned.” His file in the military graves registrar.

Technical assistant Péter Nyolcas, Jászladány (Szolnok county), 27 May 1921 – Budyonny, 26 September 1942, buried on 29 in “Budenyj, next to the church”. Cause of death: “car accident, basal skull fracture, pneumonia”. His file in the military graves registrar.

Photo by Tamás Konok

L-Po

There are two points in Europe, when conjoined with a mild arc, to the south of which we see the places of Latin culture. The end closer to us, Lemberg, is already well known to the readers of río Wang, although since 1939 does not fit any more to the abbreviation Polonia. But about the other end, Lisbon, the capital of Portugal little has been said so far.

Nevertheless, it is a place where I felt the same certainty as in Lemberg: I will come back, this wonderful place does not let me go. Although otherwise, when I leave a city, I always look back a little, because saying farewell is always sad – I begin to feel what the Portuguese express with the word soudade –, but now this did not happen. Here, I will come back.

What do the Portuguese give, what does this city give you? Everything to everyone, I think, but especially to me, what I need now.

The city

The first night, while walking, I felt that the houses were friendly and familiar. Well, of course. The same eyes, the same hearts, the same spirit designed these buildings, as at the other end, in Lemberg. That Latin colorfulness, the narrow streets, balconies and terraces, which were born under the hands of Italian masters in 16th and 17th-century Lemberg, here create the same atmosphere from the 18th on. The milieu of Lisbon is very similar to that of Lemberg, as if the two cities still held each other’s hand – but they do not look in the same direction. The one peered through the mist of the ocean to the far away end of the world and the fabulous Eldorado, while the other often anxiously looked toward the darkening woods, wondering who would emerge from behind them. Lisbon is surely beloved by its residents.

Lemberg	Lisbon

And here, on this square I fell in love with this place.

The ocean

It’s different. Very different. In geography lesson we wrote: seven-tenths of the Earth is covered with water, but we do not feel and do not understand what it means. Here comes the moment for both. When you hear the water striking against the wall of the pier, or shaking the ferry port, you will understand it. And when you enter it, you will feel it, in a weird dichotomy: it caresses you like the warm-watered lake Balaton, but sometimes it also shows it strength: be careful, man, in a good part of the world I am the master.

Guitar music in the evening port. In the background, the sounds of the ocean

The people living here surely feel this. Columbus was laughed at by his contemporaries not for his view that the Earth is spherical – as it is spread about with a dull anti-medievalism, although even Umberto Eco has already written its refutation – but for his audacity: how can be so reckless, to sail against this power with a wooden trough? Even the Portuguese prince Henry the Navigator traveled only little, and his journeys – like those of all contemporary sailors – carefully followed the coastline.

The people

Friendly, relaxed people live here, this is the City of Sincere Smile. Beautiful people, women and men, the faces of many of them is painted in gold and coffee colors by vivacious blood and the sun. Their gazes bear witness to that world without haste, which probably all of us long for. With a smile and with cheerful gestures everything can be arranged. This can be seen in the look of the older lady who runs the restaurant, “where are you hurrying?” when I order without looking at the menu, and the same look becomes respectful, when I order vinho verde to the Portuguese-style steak made with white wine, with which the loud Russian and rigid German tourists drink beer. This is in the cheerful twinkling eyes and irresistible smiles of the Angolan girl, who was a pioneer in Cuba. In the mysteriously gleaming whiteness of the eyes of the Africans. And in the sad look of another girl, when I say goodbye to her before starting to the airport.

For us Hungarians, there is also a place where this feeling gives way to pleasant pride. This is the entrance of the Light Stadium of Benfica Sport Club.

Béla Guttman

Miklós Fehér

The language

The renowned early 20th-century Hungarian author Dezső Kosztolányi, the show pupil son of the school director, started to learn Portuguese on a summer holiday. He called it “a loose Latin”, and wrote about many funny and sweet surprises about this “flirt with the spirit of mankind”. To me, the sweetest thing in this “flirt” is the accents. Many words end in os, which must be usually pronounced as us, but it depends on your mood, what it becomes in the given moment. Proud contempt? Ús. Anger? Uss. Will you stop talking? Uzh. Don’t they pay attention to you? Úúús.

Kosztolányi imagined himself a tyrant who “motivated” him in learning Portuguese. If he could just have come here, he would have probably not spoken about a tyrant, but the smoothness and warmth of the air, the old houses of the city, the people. With them, you can learn Portuguese much sooner.

And we will not forget about this city. We will soon write about it again.

Cults

„I still did not know whom I had actually encountered on Petřín. Had I come
upon some secret sect? Had I witnessed the birth of a new faith? Or, on the contrary,
was the underground worship the dying tremor of an ancient religion?”

Michal Ajvaz, The Other City (2005)

The Prague of Michal Ajvaz’ The Other City is the site of many mysterious rites, some not even actually hidden, but “just visible from the corners of our eyes”. A container for sand on the hill of Petřín is, in reality, the skylight of the dome of an underground pagan cathedral, and the last door of the basement restroom of the Kavárna Slavia opens up on an immense jungle traversed by a powerful river, in which the members of a tiger-worshiping sect are slaughtering their own heretics. All this might be regarded as simple writer’s fiction in the spirit of Kafka, … were it not for the fact that, during our Prague sojourns, we had found an increasing number of weak signals, flickering indications, that Ajvaz’ fiction is much closer to reality than one would dare think.

We have already described how, soon after the emergence of independent Czechoslovakia, celebrated annually on 28 October as Den vzniku samostatného československého státu (Czechoslovak Independence Day), hoodlums in Prague’s Old Market Square demolished

the Mariánský sloup, the Marian Column erected in the 1620s in memory of the Hapsburg victory over the Czech estates, a monument which was also used to mark the Prague meridian, that is, the moment when its shadow daily fell on an exact north-south line was used to indicate the local noon. Its central role in space and ideology was then supplanted by the statue of Jan Hus, which, as has already been mentioned, also brought forth a specific local cult, the Czechoslovak religion. The location and the statue, as the picture below shows, has since proved to be a magnet for unorthodox cults. But here in this writing, we wish only to honestly report what we have seen with our very own eyes.

At some time in the post-transition years, two markers of stone and bronze were placed on the pavement of the Old Town Square (previously the Old Market Square, mentioned above). One is located along the projection of the north-south shadow of the former column, solemnly marked with the inscription: Meridianus, quo olim tempus Pragensis dirigebatur – “The meridian, by which the local time of Prague was adjusted”. And the other, in granite, indicates the location of the column that once cast that shadow, and says: Hic stabat et iterum stabit columna B[eatae] M[ariae] V[irginis] – “Here stood and will stand again the column of the Holy Virgin Mary”.

It is apparent that this inscription goes beyond mere historical memory, and refers to a rite by which followers endeavor to re-erect the former Marian column as a kind of axis mundi. And secret rites always produce their own persecutors and heretics. This is attested by the fact that the future tense verbs have been carefully chipped away, purposely effaced in an act of vandalism, in all the four language versions of the inscription. In Prague, on the Old Town Square, the polemics of iconoclasts and iconophiles has been going on for a hundred years, unseen, and only embodied in the vestiges of absent objects.

Now, however, just like Ajvaz peering into the sand container at Petřín, and going through the restroom door of the Slavia Café, we also had the rare occasion to glimpse, ever so fleetingly, at the strange cults thriving in the twilight of Prague.

The last day of October, the Eve of All Saints, in an earlier English, “All Hallow’s Even” (from which we derive our present-day Hallowe’en). We wandered onto the Old Town Square in the early evening. Turning onto the square from behind the house on the corner, we note with surprise that a young nun is praying at the mark of the former site of the Marian column. Before her, a candle is burning on the granite inscription. She cradles a bouquet of flowers, and is about to lay them on the spot, a touching act of devotion. I lift my camera and quickly make an exposure, intending to make more. However, there is no time for a second shot. The nun starts when she notes the presence of a photographer. She looks straight at me, visibly alarmed, and immediately turns and flees the square, running. Before we can catch up with her, she has already disappeared among the throngs of tourists.

A world saved on glass plates

Black warriors, Mediterranean children, streets of little Southern French towns, half-timbered houses, excursionists in the German mountains, costumed characters in rooms furnished in Dutch style.

In the observatory tower of the Baroque university of Wrocław, on the exhibition Zatrzymane w szkladnym kadrze – A world saved on glass plates.

None of the photos has any caption. A few locations are recognizable: Ethiopia, the Cathedral of Ferrara, Lake Como. The rest is unknown: do you recognize any of them? The glass plates come from the educational aids collection of the university of Breslau, five thousand of them were digitized by the university of Wrocław, only a small proportion of the complete material. Once they were perhaps organized as lists written by hand or kept in mind, like the slide collections of our high school professors. These, however, have long vanished, just like the former professors, the university, and Breslau itself. Their single remaining organizing principle, place of origin and homeland are those hundreds of cardboard boxes in which they have survived the vicissitudes of a century, and whose exotic labels were put on show, with good historical sense, at the entrance.

However, without captions, and merging into one multicolored world, the photos let you feel much better, how they might have lived on in the minds of the students, to whom they were projected in the various lectures, and to whom they represented the big world in a small world, short of images.

Nevertheless, these photos are also excellent documents of such exotic lands, which were not visited by many photographers at that time. Who was the one who photographed Abyssinia in such detail, the rural world of the Mediterranean, the German villages? Whoever he was, he has his place among the pioneers of the photographic discovery of the world.

And the vanished worlds preserved for us by these images also include the one which preserved them, while itself vanished: the city carrying the promise of great development, Breslau at the turn of the century.