Four hundred tons of secret maps

While wandering through Riga, we stumble upon a map shop tucked inside the former Berga Bazārs arcade. At first glance, it looks simply like a good shop, offering a solid selection of international maps and travel guides.

But then we discover the shelf of Russian maps, which seem to chart worlds that barely exist. An atlas of the Jewish autonomous region of Birobidzhan, Stalin’s “anti-Israel” along the Amur River, where today only one percent of the population is Jewish, yet a Yiddish newspaper is still published and Yiddish remains a mandatory subject in elementary schools. A map for navigating around Lake Ladoga, where just reaching it feels harder than getting to the Moon. An atlas for the residents of Murmansk, where during World War I even Hungarians could easily reach on free train tickets – they only needed to build the railway first.

Prokudin-Gorsky: Prisoners of war from the Austro-Hungarian Empire on the construction of the Murmansk railway (the “Murmelbahn”)

The real surprise, however, comes afterward. It isn’t until we reach the counter to pay that we notice the piles of map sheets stacked from floor to ceiling behind the clerk – and the trilingual sign declaring them strictly confidential topographic maps of the Soviet Army.

We take a closer look. Four 1:500,000 sheets cover Hungary, but there are 1:25,000 sheets for the major cities. Written in Cyrillic, the city names sound exactly like the way old Red Army veterans I once met across the former USSR pronounced them. Curiosity leads me to search for the former Soviet military airfield in Mátyásföld, which I knew during its operational days, and which turned out to have been staffed by Georgian officers after the Soviets withdrew. Yet the detailed Будапешт map still hides the airfield even from their own officers – it’s marked as farmland.

The shop clerk, enjoying our enthusiasm, shows us a detailed map sheet of Washington, D.C., with the Pentagon and the White House, where every facility is color-coded by function and by population density. It turns out that the Soviet Army had produced and updated similarly detailed maps of every part of the world that interested them, at least once a decade.

“How did you lay hands on this material?” I ask, tactlessly, but the clerk answers eagerly. He explains that the shop owner had been a civilian employee in the Soviet Army in Latvia in 1992, during their withdrawal, and learned that the top-secret maps were to be handed over to a paper mill for destruction by higher orders. He immediately began negotiating with the responsible officer to purchase at least the most interesting sheets. The army initially refused, but a week later they demanded $14,000 for the material. The owner obtained the money – “don’t ask how,” the clerk adds – and went to the warehouse for the shipment. The warehouse workers were too lazy to sort the sheets and told him to take it all. He shipped four hundred tons of map sheets in several train cars – and still has plenty of each. Except for San Francisco, the clerk adds, because someone from there once discovered the shop and wrote an article about it. Locals bought up the sheets like candy, and now even Washington sheets are scarce.

As a final flourish, a group of six or seven young Americans enters the shop. They are looking for a map sheet of South Carolina, the city of Greenville. When they get it, their jaws drop. “Oh my God, here’s our lake house!” screams one girl. “And here’s our church!” They immediately buy two copies. “Shouldn’t it be four? How many more do you have?” “Seventy-one more.”

The group leader explains that they volunteer at a local Latvian scout camp; the others are first-timers, he has been there multiple times. “And how did you find this shop?” “A friend told me I absolutely had to come here, because OMG, you wouldn’t believe the material!”

It is truly astonishing, bizarre, and slightly oppressive to see so plainly how avidly the Soviet Army – and by extension the state that controlled it – kept track of the parts of the world they cared about. It provides a tiny psychological footnote to the Russian state’s current insatiable appetite for information.

Just for the souvenir, we buy the 1989 Hungarian sheet including Budapest (yes, even at that time, before the withdrawal, it was still updated!) along with a solid reference book: The Red Atlas: How the Soviet Union secretly mapped the world, 2017. Only after leaving the shop do I realize I never checked how they represented, if at all, the Soviet barracks at Hajmáskér and the surrounding training grounds in the Bakony hills, where I trained on tanks. I will have to go back for that.

Production report on a sunken world

We – my brother Gyuri and I – got to know Lajos Erdélyi in our childhood from his photo album about the Jewish cemeteries of Transylvania. This was, I think, the first book that gave news, showed pictures and offered short but thought-provoking analyses of those cemeteries and their richly carved tombstones, which at that time were still sunken into the ground and overgrown with bushes all over Eastern Europe, waiting to be rediscovered. It was this book that started us, like many others, to discover these cemeteries and the former Jewish culture of our Eastern Europe. And the photos in this book also served as models for how to photograph these cemeteries, the pathos of the tombstones leaning forward, the helplessness of the stones standing in frightened rows, the cheerfulness of the anthropomorphic symbolic animals.

This album was probably the closest to the author himself, who said several times: “I was a Hungarian among Romanians, and a Jew among Hungarians”. His memoir as to what it meant to be “a Jew among Hungarians”, was just published in Litera. But this thin, poorly printed Kriterion edition was merely a love child in his work as a photographer and writer. The “legitimate” offspring were the photographs he took as an employee of the Hungarian-language Romanian newspaper Új Élet (New Life) about the life of the Socialist country from Oradea to the Danube Delta. In 2023, the negatives of these photographs, Lajos Erdélyi’s complete archive, were given by his heirs to the Blinken OSA Archive in Budapest, where, after two years of work, an exhibition entitled The insensitive photojournalist has now opened, selected and curated by Lenke Szilágyi and Zsuzsanna Zádori.

The newspaper needed production reports on the successes of Socialist industrialization, on the incredible new achievements under Ceauşescu, on a prosperous and happy country. Lajos Erdélyi went where he was sent, and photographed what was needed. But in his pictures, alongside the concrete and steel monsters, there is always a piece of real life. And that dominates the picture.

By collecting and invetorying a multitude of such pieces of real life, this archive became the chronicle of a sunken world that many of us have seen and recognize, but those who come after us will only be able to see it in Lajos Erdélyi’s pictures.

A literally sunken world that we have not seen: the last years of the village of Bözödújfalu (Bezidu Nou), which was doomed to be flooded in 1988. It must have been painful for all of Lajos Erdélyi’s identities to document the destruction of this Székely village that, from the 17th century on, converted to Judaism.

Those who saw these photos in Új Élet, where they were published in the form of poorly printed stamps, can only now really see them for the first time. The curators sometimes display original newspaper prints side by side with the enlarged version of the detailed and sensitive photo. The latter in this format tells stories that perhaps was better not to be caught by the censors of the time.

And the camera with which Lajos Erdélyi photographed all of this. The Nikon F camera was given to him as a gift by his former schoolmate and fellow prisoner in the concentration camp, Raymond Naftali, who emigrated to America.

Pathos formulas

The Zeugma Mosaic Museum displays a total of 2,500 square meters of Roman mosaic floors that were rescued by international archaeological teams from the city of Zeugma, which had been built on the banks of the Euphrates in 300 BC and destroyed in 256 AD, before the city was flooded in 2000. This is the largest mosaic museum in the world.

One of the most beautiful and best-preserved 3rd-4th-c. mosaics in the Zeugma Mosaic Museum in Gaziantep depicts the abduction of Europa according to the conventions of ancient images. Europa, the daughter of the Phoenician king Agenor, is already sitting on the back of the bull that Zeus transformed into to seduce her. The bull swims with her towards Crete, and to make this more believable, its body ends in a fish tail. For the sake of symmetry, the left half of the picture is filled with a similar pair: a naiad – a sea nymph – sits on the back of a winged water leopard, which also has a fish tail.

It was absolutely not unusual in ancien art for any mammal to acquire a fish tail in a marine environment. The Romans knew from their literary studies that there was a hippo-potamus, a water horse in Egypt, which they imagined as a regular horse with a fish tail. And if there is a water horse, why should not there be a water deer, a water leopard, a water tiger or a sea bear? Vast is the sea, it hides many wonders. For example, the Arion mosaic floor of the Villa Romana di Casale in Sicily, which is roughly the same age as the Europa mosaic in Zeugma, presents us with a multitude of such aquatic mammals:

But there is a strange one among the pictorial conventions that is difficult to explain at first glance. What is the cloth that Europa holds outstreched, to be blown by the wind? And we see the same wind-blown cloth on the Sicilian mosaic above the heads of at least three naiads.

Roman art critics called this formula velificatio, which means velam+facere, that is, “to make a sail” (from one’s own clothes). ANd the one who makes the sail is a velificans. This is how Pliny uses this term in his Naturalis historia 36.29, describing the decoration of Octavia’s portico, on which Aurae velificantes sua veste, the Winds “make sails from their own clothes”. From this we also know what could have decorated Octavia’s portico, which, since the Middle Ages, was used as a fish market in the Jewish quarter, deprived of its original marble covering.

The formula of the velificatio had a double meaning. On the one hand, it suggested dynamics in the mostly static Roman images, which used few elements of movement. It suggested that the scene was actually in violent motion. On the other hand, by the fact that the wind that puffed out the cloth into a sail was actually miraculously blowing “from within”, it also suggested a kind of revelatio, that is, that the veil was lifted from the face of a person who should otherwise remain hidden: that an epiphany was taking place, the manifestation of the divine in this world, similarly to how the light that illuminated Renaissance and Baroque Nativity scenes emanated from the newborn Jesus.

On the eastern side of the Roman Ara Pacis (13-9 BC), the seated Mother Earth or the Peace of Rome is flanked by two nymphs with puffed cloaks, the allegories of  air and water, indicating that, with Augustus, peace had arrived on earth, water and sky.

Neptune’s chariot on a mosaic from Hadrumetum (Sosa Museum, Tunisia). This image also illustrates how the Romans imagined water horses.

Fresco from the Villa dei Misteri in Pompeii

The formula was rediscovered from the Renaissance onwards (although it was not completely lost in the Middle Ages): here on Botticelli’s Birth of Venus

It is only natural that the Pre-Raphaelites, who imitated quattrocento compositions, also used the formula, as here in John Williams Waterhouse’s Boreas

Modern art history, starting with Aby Warburg (1866-1929), classifies this formula as one of the pathos formulas. According to Aby Warburg’s definition, the pathos formula or Pathosformel is a pictorial topos which, according to the common consesus of the time, should evoke a certain mood or emotional response from the viewer. We do not encounter most of these formulas in real life – such as puffed-up dresses above the head, or a number of Baroque gestures, because Baroque art in particular used such formulas – but viewers still knew exactly what they should feel when they saw these gestures, and which key the formula provided for the interpretation of the picture.

Pictures, even the most realistic pictures, do not depict reality, but use conventional formulas through which the viewer reconstructs a certain image of reality in himself. In this way, pathos formulas are still with us today, even if we do not pay attention to their unreality and do not reflect on the emotional effect they intend to evoke. To illustrate their persuasive power, let me present here that wide-eyed, wide-mouthed figure who, in advertisements, marvels at the wonderful quality or the wonderfully low price of a merchandise, in short on its epiphany.

In view of this figure, we know exactly how we should feel about the merchandise in question, and what we should do: go and buy it. Even if we never encounter such a facial expression in real life – the pictures have taught us how to interpret it. Although never say never: it is part of the effect of the pathos formulas that after a while the viewers also start to use them, since they know how the gesture will be interpreted by other contemporary viewers. Just as the passionate gestures of Baroque paintings became part of social behavior after a while (and not the other way around), or as nowadays we often react to unexpected news with bulging eyes and a gaping mouth. Not as if this were our instictive gesture, but because this is how we, taught by the ads, convey our astonishment to our contemporaries who also know the respective pathos formula.