Each summer the Flinn Scholars Program takes an entire class of Scholars to Budapest, Hungary, and neighboring Romania for a three-week seminar on the emerging democracies of Eastern Europe. So, here’s a day-by-day account. And until they’re done, we’re going on vacation. Ah, the glories of outsourcing…
Michael Cochise Young:
On May 29, while the Scholars trekked through Statue Park, Agi took me to a secluded coffeehouse. First, however, the Park: After the ‘89 revolution, many communities debated the fate of the heroic-scaled socialist-realist statuary and public art that represented the newly-overturned ideologies of the past half-century. Unready to destroy many of the most-distinctive pieces and so re-write (by erasing) two generations’ history, the new leadership chose to preserve these monuments–but to put them into exile on the outskirts of Budapest.
Thus, Statue (aka Memento) Park, a gallery of out-scaled testaments to The Worker and The People in Solidarity Advancing toward Progress and even the casts of Lenin’s boots, all that remained when his full-body figure was hauled down, hacked and melted. About two well-trodden if weedy acres house these idealized reminders of a socialist-communist vision. Ironically, the park is supported by the gift kiosk at the front of the park, where one can buy souvenirs of the Red era: actual (not replica) medals, Socialist Youth badges, tee-shirts satirizing the Marx Brothers (featuring Karl and Lenin and Stalin)… Yes, even the two-CD set of The Greatest Hits of Communism, vols. 1 and 2. No music library is complete without them. When you’re interested in listening, I do possess them both, but haven’t played them even for goulash-inspired dinner parties. Maybe this fall…
Back to the coffee house: In the shaded retirement of an obscure courtyard, Agi revealed a retreat that features 19th-century family pastry recipes. Accommodating no more than a dozen persons in wing-back green tapestry chairs or low embroidered settees, mirrored columns segregate each table into its own “room,” where one can enjoy puff pastry so airy-crisp that it snaps, but each crackle is muffled by a cloud of a vanilla cream that’s equal parts whipped confection and satin pudding–all in the shadow of a secret Budapest garden. Although I know I must have passed its entrance at least twice later that same day, I could not find the gate again, as befits fairy-tale chambers…
That was a proper introduction to the day’s program on kavehaus culture, where poets and artists, each population favoring one or another of the city’s major cafes, would have “their” individual tables at which they would hold court, negotiate with publishers, or, surrounded by their notebooks and papers, spend hours composing or sketching or scribbling. At noon we met one of Hungary’s most important literary critics, Geza Kallay, (principally a Shakespearean, but also) a noted writer on the 19th century poet Ady in Ady’s own flat to discuss his work and the challenges of translating even simple verse and the nuances introduced and lost with each word choice. Grounded in Ady’s lived-in environment of 100 years past, we adjourned to Ady’s favorite cafe for lunch and an afternoon of poetry writing under the tutelage of Prof. Kallay, who would set exercises dictated by rhyme scheme or stanza structure/metrics or…
Thence, the students retired to their first Hungarian home stays. Agi discovered a concert of contemporary music (one world and three Hungarian premieres) being broadcast live on Magyar Radio. So, off to Studio Six of M.R.!
On May 28, Gyula Fekete had observed wryly that a “serious” composer could generally count on an audience of 30 for any performance: his family and closest friends and those of the performers. For a second night… there may not be a second night. We appeared to be the only persons in the 50-person house not to be related to someone on stage–and that included a thirty-person a cappella choir! The first and last pieces were both sacred music. The latter, by Schmittke, was a setting of penitential psalms that were less penitential than wistful, laments for opportunities lost–regret, not remorse, the soundtrack for Dante’s Limbo and the outermost circles of the Inferno. The middle pieces (one, by conductor Pierre Boulez) were more dynamic and innovative compositions for cello ensemble: lyrical and angular at once.
Most of our students, we learned, joined their hosts at a club featuring traditional folk dancing–a wonderful way for them to see how an “old” culture remains vital and vibrant for a new generation. I am grateful for hearing “high” culture continuing to reinvent itself. There will follow more opportunities for immersion in the folk tradition in the days ahead.
I believed upon setting out for Balaton the next day that we were destined to camp. We had had such an experience several years ago along the Hungary-Slovakia border, in the network of caves that comprise the Aggtelek national park, and isosceles-peaked cabins nestle into the hillside, requiring occupants over 5′6″ to scramble up wooden ladders into the lofts and avoid raising our heads so as not to raise lumps on the top of those same heads.
At Lake Balaton (landlocked Hungary’s “inland sea”), lacking caravans or tents for camping, we occupied lakefront self-catering cabanas about 30 meters from the water’s edge, separated only by a clover lawn and the whine of gnats. I knelt on the paved promenade at the water’s edge, only to be rebuked by two swans and their six cygnets. Stepping into the water just above my knees, dozens of fish-fry bumped their swollen heads into my feet with touches light as fireflies.
In this setting, environmental contemplation is natural. Only the indignation of the swans at a human’s intrusion could have anticipated the intensity of our two days’ guide to the region and his ferocity over affronts to the environment: Zoltan Illes, a Ph.D. in chemical engineering, has enjoyed a colorful career as a scientific adviser to political parties, sat for two terms as a member of Parliament and served as vice-chair of the Hungarian Young Democrats and Deputy Minister of the Environment. After leaving us, he would be traveling through the Balkans to advise on trans-border environmental problems and would be joining the Hungarian President’s entourage as the principal voice of opposition to major nuclear developments in the country’s north.
Quizzes on the sources of nitrogen and phosphate pollution of this long and shallow lake. Videos of the Tisza River disasters of 2000-2001 (the cyanide spills in Baia Mare, Romania that destroyed an entire river system’s food chain). The mining-rights wars over Transylvania’s Rosa Montagna territory. Films of the illegal dumping of contaminated waste that Zoltan discovered and documented: All of these topics set the context for the next day’s explorations. From re-purposed armaments and herbicide factories to haz-mat rehabilitation sites to toxic waste incinerators, Zoltan took us to some of the region’s more problematic sites, as much to illustrate the impact on human ecology of land-air-water degradation as to lament the decline of the environment’s health. For Zoltan, concern for the environment should reflect concern first for the human inhabitants, creating viable, livable, sustainable conditions for conducting lives of integrity, dignity, and value–lives, he insists, that demand individuals’ assumption of responsibility for their choices and the impacts of those decisions on their surroundings.
Our time in Balaton ended with a 3-1/2-hr hike through another national park, guided by Zoltan and two rangers (one a geologist, the other a botanist), who guided us through rock scrambles up the sides of extinct geysers, through woodlands and vineyards and vistas over the tree canopies. Wild thyme and sage perfumed volcanic outcroppings, seashell fossils littered the lower slopes of the hills, and succulents nestled in rock niches. Feather grass is my newest plant discovery: a single stalk covered in short blond cilia, the whole twisting into a loose spiral that shimmers and sways with the slightest whisper of air.
Zoltan advocates for one other quality-of-life issue nearly as enthusiastically as he does the environment: dessert! All in our 24-person party were treated to two scoops of gelato. Before lunch. And “chestnut spaghetti” after (extruded chestnut puree topped with whipped cream–a classic “light” Hungarian dessert. We had to fortify ourselves, Zoltan exhorted, to carry on the good fight for environmental justice.
Liz expressed regret that our reception on June 1 in the 1300-person Roma community of Alsoszentmarton (near the Croatian border) was not fraught with the same level of celebration as our first entry, during her own central Euro adventure in 2002. I suggested instead that what she took as a waning of enthusiasm represented a normalization of relations. No longer were we a matter of both wary observation and cause for Bacchic revelry. Instead, we’re now taken in as welcome distant cousins–the only outsiders to make this community a destination.
I had organized readings and discussion around the “tourism of calamity” that makes both viewers and viewed into exhibits to gratify each party’s curiosity: an intellectually justified voyeurism (or exhibitionism). Now we can interact, however awkwardly (given the lack of common language) with mutual respect and affection. Agi enjoys the linguistic advantage. As the person with the longest history with the principal families of the village, I am the person to inquire after the awkward near-toddler I met on my first visits who’s now almost a teenager; the recent high-school graduate of 2002 who has now graduated university and taken a job on a cruise ship (better and higher-paid employment prospects to help support his parents and siblings).
We exchange greetings across miles and years and presents (roses from the patriarch’s garden, two-kilo loaves of bread from the matriarch’s back-garden adobe kiln). We perch around linoleum tables in the “community hall” (a 45×15-foot concrete-floored space with an elevated wood stage at one end). Ironware pots of lesco (pepper-and-onion stew) and Serbian-influenced boiled chicken are passed around to be ladled into soup plates and mopped up with lumps of the chewy, dense bread mentioned above. Nests of shredded cabbage-and-lettuce with wet wedges of tomato are the salad course. We ask questions. Agi translates both ways–the only speaker of both Hungarian and English (and a little Romani) for many miles. We soothe her voice with swigs of orange Cappi (an extra-sweet, Fanta-like beverage) or shots of ebony coffee, thick as cream.
A long walk through the village. The earliest structures in the settlement, originally Croat, display elaborate painted motifs across the front of the houses or on plaques set between the window frames (independent of whether those frames ever saw glass). Children follow the Scholars like Pied Pipers, particularly those creating balloon fantasies as we walk. Crowns are particularly popular. Balloon swords impaled many of our company; my own appendix must have been removed (and my head, too) at least three or four times.
At the end of our afternoon… a sacramental moment when Kati (the matriarch) and her sisters formally presented two loaves of the bread, carefully wrapped in a green windowpane plaid linen, invoking their oldest and absent son, asking that when we shared the bread at our next meal, we remember Lazlo–and all the village–to break bread in remembrance of their community and to take the bread as a pledge of our relationship.
(Photo by Amy Stabler (’07))
And on the very same day that we caught a glimpse of the future Guv, we met 
