On the way

When you are reading this, we are with Wang Wei somewhere in this region, on the way to Galicia. We will be back on Monday, and it is not sure that we will reach internet until then. If yes, we will both write and answer.

Košice/Kassa

Humenné/Homonna

Badejov/Bártfa

Vranov/Varannó

Cracow

source of the photos: Sáros László – Váli Dezső: tanú ez a kőhalom – this cairn is witness today,
Budapest: Új Mandátum kiadó, 1993

Happiness

The sun has almost not risen in Palma when we left for Budapest. The Hungarians, when traveling by air, have two habits you should know. They queue up for the gate upon arrival even if two hours are missing for the flight and even if the stewardess repeats several times that there is still much time until boarding, as was the case today. The other peculiarity is to burst into loud applause and cheering as the flight touches down, as if the pilot had made a dangerous acrobatic feat rather than a simple landing.

Before arriving at the Hungarian home I saw a touching picture under the veil of the late June rain improperly covering Budapest. It was like returning to childhood, but to a childhood lived in another site. In my home Palma they also used to put on the door the empty siphon bottles to be changed for full ones. But this was long, long time ago, when there were still guards roaming the streets at night, and I went to school in shorts all year round.

In our deepest inner happiness is called Budapest.

Felicidad

Casi no había salido el sol en Palma cuando partimos hacia Budapest. Los húngaros cuando viajan en avión tienen dos costumbres que conviene conocer. Se ponen en la cola de la puerta de embarque en cuanto llegan, aunque falten dos horas para el vuelo o aunque la azafata, como ha sido hoy el caso, les repita varias veces que todavía falta mucho para empezar a embarcar. La otra peculiaridad es prorrumpir en ruidosos aplausos y vítores en cuanto el avión toca tierra, como si el piloto hubiera realizado una peligrosa hazaña acrobática en lugar de un sencillo aterrizaje.

Antes de llegar a la casa de la familia húngara he visto una imagen emocionante bajo el velo de esta llovizna impropia de finales de junio que cubría Budapest. Ha sido como volver a la infancia, pero en este caso una infancia vivida en otro sitio. En nuestra Palma natal también ponían en la puerta, hace mucho tiempo, las botellas de sifón vacías para que las cambiaran por otras llenas. Pero eso era hace mucho, mucho tiempo, cuando aún había serenos rondando las calles por la noche y yo iba a la escuela con pantalones cortos todo el año.

En nuestro interior más profundo la felicidad se llama Budapest.

Twilight in Aswan

When using the adjective “Mediterranean” or the term “Mediterranean culture”, we usually understand. each other. More or less. But if we want to clarify this concept, its outlines become blurred. Egypt is an example of this blurring. Cairo is Mediterranean. Alexandria is undoubtedly even more. Luxor is still Mediterranean. But Aswan is no longer. Something has been lost on the road. Greece and Rome reached as far as Aswan. And they went much further southwards. Monasteries such as Saint Simeon witness the establishment of Christianity which is still there, with even more force than one might imagine. Aramaic and Jewish communities thrived on Elephantine Island. It is in Aswan that the same Nile which bathes Cairo quiets down, becomes wider, softer, kinder, more sea-like. The communication of Aswan to the north was always very sparse. It has always been a market (as the etymology of the Egyptian name, SWENET, and the Arabic As-suan indicate), a southern avant-garde of the civilizations of the north. Even with all that, this is not a Mediterranean city. Aswan reveals its being essentially an outpost towards an unexplored land in which the expeditions got lost or returned with stories about vast territories, forests, plains, animals, heat. Any traveler coming from the north immediately had to recognize that he was not at home any more in Aswan, even though Aswan has been a welcoming home to humanity since the Paleolithic age. Aswan is Egypt’s Finisterre, a place where legends begin, a melancholic point where you must change your look and forget the past.



It is very hot in Aswan. The dammed river invites to swim, even at the risk of the dreaded schistosomiasis (in hotels and some bars with terraces overlooking the Nile there are swimming pools, but you have to pay.) The Nilometers of Elephantine nowadays lack their once absolutely essential role to measure the rising waters. However, the flow of wealth to Aswan is marked by the arrival, scheduled in perfectly regular periods, of the large cruise ships arriving from Cairo and leaving in the city their flow of cash. The merchants know well on what day of the week come the ships loaded with Spaniards, on which day the Germans, when the Italians... and prepare the harvest of each group according to their preferences and peculiarities.

Atardecer en Asuán

Cuando utilizamos el adjetivo «mediterráneo» o la expresión «cultura mediterránea» solemos entendernos. Más o menos. Si después queremos precisar este concepto sus contornos se vuelven borrosos. Egipto es un ejemplo de esta difuminación. El Cairo es mediterráneo. Sin duda aún lo es más Alejandría. Todavía Luxor es mediterránea. Pero ya no lo es Asuán. Algo se ha perdido en el camino. Grecia y Roma llegaron hasta Asuán. Y aún bastante más abajo. Monasterios como el de San Simeón atestiguan la implantación del cristianismo, que sigue allí presente con más fuerza incluso de la que uno podría imaginar. Comunidades judías y arameas prosperaron en la isla Elefantina. El mismo Nilo que baña El Cairo se remansa en Asuán y es aquí más amplio, más suave, más benévolo, más «mar». La comunicación de Asuán con el norte fue siempre estrechísima. Era un mercado (tanto la etimología del nombre egipcio, Swenet, como la árabe, As-suan, así lo indican), la vanguardia sur de las civilizaciones del norte. Aún y con todo eso, esta no es una ciudad mediterránea. Asuán hace ostensible su característica de lanzadera hacia una tierra inexplorada en la que las expediciones se perdían o volvían contando historias de vastos territorios, selvas, llanuras, bestias, calor. Cualquier viajero del norte debía percibir enseguida que en Asuán no estaba en su casa —a pesar de que fue hogar acogedor para el hombre desde el paleolítico—. Asuán es el Finisterre de Egipto: un lugar donde empiezan las leyendas, un punto, ciertamente melancólico, donde debe cambiarse la mirada y abandonarse el pasado.



Hace mucho calor en Asuán. El río remansado invita a nadar, aun a riesgo de la temida esquistosomiasis (en los hoteles y algunos bares con terrazas sobre el Nilo hay piscinas, pero hay que pagar). Los nilómetros de Elefantina carecen hoy de la función —entonces absolutamente esencial— de medir la subida de las aguas. En cambio, el flujo de riqueza en Asuán lo marca la llegada, perfectamente pautada a períodos regulares, de los grandes barcos de crucero que llegan desde El Cairo y dejan sobre la ciudad su flujo de dinero. Los comerciantes saben bien qué día de la semana llegan los barcos cargados de españoles, qué día los alemanes, cuándo los italianos… y preparan la cosecha de cada grupo según sus preferencias y peculiaridades.

Greetings

This postcard was recently published on a Russian historical forum. According to its date it was written on 9 December 1945 in the Bessarabian – today Southern Ukrainian – Khotin, with the following text:

Хотин, Бессарабия, 9/XII-45 Дорогая мамочка! Поздровляю тебя с Новым 1946 Годом! Желаю здоровья и счастья! До скорой встречи дорогая мамочка! Лев.

Khotin, Bessarabia, 9 December 1945 Dear Mother! I greet you in the New Year of 1946! I wish you good health and happiness! See you soon, dear mother! Lev.

The postcard was most probably written by a soldier of the Soviet army occupying Bessarabia. This is plausible not only because of the historical circumstances – Bessarabia, which in 1918 had joined Romania from the Russian Empire, then in June 1940, in terms of the secret appendix of the Molotov-Ribbentropp Pact it fell to the share of the Soviet Union, in July 1941 it was recaptured by Romania with the help of the Wehrmacht, and in August 1944 it was occupied for good by the advancing Red Army –, but also because the postcard was delivered without a stamp, as it was usual within the Red Army. But what is the castle on it and mainly why was it printed with the Hungarian text “Levelező-Lap”, that is, “Postcard”?


Khotin, from where the mail was sent has a gorgeous Medieval castle, built above the strategical pass of the Dniester in 1400 by Prince Alexandru cel Bun (1400-1432) of Moldova. Two good photo series on the pictorial castle have been published by Tim Arbaev (1 and 2). Sergej Klimenko has offered a detailed building history and a ground-plan (another version here), an Ukrainian tourist site has published some of its old views, and also the copperplate illustration of the Polish-Turkish battle of Khotin of 1673 displays the fortress in the left upper corner. But this castle is surely not identical with the ruin to be seen on the postcard.


Another possibility that comes to mind is the castle of Visegrád, as seen from the side of the great 13th-century donjon, the so-called Salamon Tower. But only for a short moment. In fact, the donjon of Visegrád is much shorter, and neither the wall in front of it is the regular rondella represented on the postcard.


You think of all these possibilities of course only because on the small version of the picture published in the forum you do not immediately discover the small and worn inscription in the lower left corner: “Trencsén”, that is, Trenčín in Northwestern Slovakia, along the Váh river.

But even after discovering the inscription, you will have doubts. Because the castle of Trenčín is absolutely not like these scanty wall remains on the postcard. But like this:





These pictures attest that the castle of Trenčín is one of the most intact medieval fortresses in Slovakia. However, going back a little bit in time, and browsing among pre-WWI postcards, you will have a totally different impression.





True, we also find some postcards from the same period which represent the castle just as gorgeous as it is now:


However, this view – as it is revealed by the inscriptions of other similar postcards – is only the reconstruction of a two centuries earlier situation:

“Trencsén/Trenčín 200 years ago”.

And the source of the reconstruction is a copperplate view of the castle and town of Trenčín from 1710:


The castle of Trenčín which since 1594 was in the possession of the Illésházy magnate family, looked like this until the end of the 18th century. On 11 July 1790, however, it was competely burnt out. The remains of its walls were conserved in the 1890s: that is the situation represented in the early 20th-century postcards.

The castle gained a new importance after 1920 when this northern part of the former Hungary was allotted to the freshly established Czechoslovakian state. The reason of the new interest was that in 1293 the Hungarian oligarch Matthew Csák had occupied the castle with force and made it the center of his estates that he kept increasing (seizing, among others, also Visegrád) by fishing in troubled waters in the confused years following the change of the royal dynasties of Hungary after 1301. Post-1920 Czechoslovakian historiography interpreted this episode as a first attempt to create a Slovakian state independent from the kings of Hungary, and consequently they laid great stress on the historical role of the castle. In 1952 the fortress of Trenčín was declared a first class monument, and they started its complete restoration – which in the practice meant a reconstruction of its state represented on the engraving of 1710.

A 17th-century plan of the castle of Trenčín in the Krigsarkivet of Stockholm.
(On the plans of the Hapsburg castles kept in the archive of Stockholm
see: György Kisari Balla: Törökkori várrajzok Stockholmban, 1996
[Fortress plans of the Turkish period in Stockholm])

Thus the postcard in fact represents the castle of Trenčín as it looked in the first half of the 20th century. Now the question is: why did the Soviet soldier send a postcard of Trenčín from Khotin, lying eight hundred kilometers away?

The question is further complicated by the Hungarian language of the printed postcard. Following the first Vienna Award (2 November 1938) which adjudged to Hungary the territories of Czechoslovakia with a Hungarian ethnic majority, Trenčín did not fell to Hungary but became part of the independent Slovakia. It is highly improbable that any postcard in Hungarian was published there at that time.

Political map of the Pannonian Basin after the two Vienna Awards (1938, 1940).
We have indicated the places of the three castles mentioned in the post.

Furthermore, the back side of the postcard also has the name of the publisher: Gansel Lipót, Trencsén. According to the printers’ database of the Hungarian National Library, the Gansel press worked between 1850 and 1913 in Trenčín. It was a small press, editing mostly local publications and postcards.

This means that the Soviet soldier sent from Khotin a postcard that had been published more than thirty years earlier in another country and had not been in circulation for at least twenty-five years.

It is an enigma how he laid hands on such a postcard. However, a possible solution is suggested by two cards of another Soviet soldier published on another Russian forum.

Мой боевой привет из Германии Милой и дорогой Зине. Павлик 1945 г. 15 марта.

My military greetings from Germany to the sweet and dear Zina. Pavlik 15 March 1945.

Милой и дорогой ли… Лидочке от папы. Из Германии 1945 г. 20 марта.

To the sweet and dear […] Lidochka from her Daddy. From Germany, 20 March 1945.

The two postcards had been published in Germany, first written in German, canceled with a German postmark, and in all probability German was the original postage stamp too which was removed already in the Soviet Union as a philatelistic rarity. The Soviet soldier who probably found the postcards in the house of the original German addressee or among the ruins of it, stuck an empty paper on their back side and sent them with his own greetings: the girls collecting cherry blossoms to his wife and the children playing with the cart to his little daughter.

In fact – they write on the Russian forum as an explanation of this case –, postcards, which had been popular in the cities of pre-Revolution Russia, completely disappeared in the Soviet Union between the two wars. Only during the Great Patriotic War they started to publish postcards again, with patriotic artworks and for agitation purposes. Thereby they woke up a taste for postcards in people, but the culture of their use was not yet established. Its essence was a nice picture following the personal message, just any picture that was available. It was no problem if it represented a place different from where it was sent from. Especially if the distance between the two places was negligible in respect to the distance separating the soldier from his home.

A Soviet soldier writing a letter from the front, 1944