Tomorrow's post will be on the anniversary of Archduke Franz Ferdinand's assassination, June 28.
If this intrigues you, you will definitely want to buy the book at Bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble or Amazon.
I made it from Pécs in southern Hungary - please see my previous post - with two days to spare. I'll let the pics and captions do most of the talking for this post.
Tomorrow's post will be on the anniversary of Archduke Franz Ferdinand's assassination, June 28. If this intrigues you, you will definitely want to buy the book at Bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble or Amazon.
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The name Villány may look like something sinister to English-speakers, but unlike "villainy," it's pronounced with only two syllables, the ny combo being pronounced like a Spanish ñ. And the town, and easy daytrip from southern-Hungarian provincial cities like Szeged, is quite friendly. Though you might not find that much English spoken, as it caters mostly to Hungarians and was historically a bilingual town with a substantial German population.
That said, when I made the train trip from Pécs (see my previous post), the Gál Pince's owner was eager to use his English as he introduced me to a meggyes or black-cherry pálinka (schnapps). I then slipped over to the Hétfogás fogadó, or "Seven-tooth Inn," for a meal, washed down with a kékfrankos or "Blue Franconian" wine, common in Central Europe. The next stop was the Fritsch Pince (pince means "cellar" in Hungarian), where I had to struggle with my Hungarian. The owner was patient with my slightly-above-beginner Magyar language skills. I wondered, following decades of Western inculcation with the idea that "red wine is served at room temperature," why his reds were cool. Not the least bit perturbed, he responded matter-of-factly that it comes out of the cellar. No kidding, I thought. Common-sense, but a paradigm shift for me. In years since, I've noticed that many reds at room temperature tend to "burn" a bit on the tongue. Once recently, noticing this effect, I asked the server to put the remainder of the bottle in the fridge, and after 10 minutes it was perfect. The "acidic" effect had been reigned in, and the mellower flavors could shine through. I can't guarantee you'll have an experience like mine, but if you get off the beaten path in a town like Villány, I'm sure you'll find plenty of menus in English - even if you have to point to communicate your choice to the server. These discoveries and other delights for the eyes and the tongue are covered in more detail in Chapter 3 of my book: "Hungary: Polysyllables, Paprika and Pálinka." I suggest you browse the slide show above - all pictures click through to Travels with Ferdinand. You'll want to order and read the entire text! Next up: Awaiting an Awkward Centenary - Sarajevo! The southern Hungarian city of Pécs certainly deserves its reputation as a European Capital of Culture - it shared that honor with Essen, Germany and Istanbul in 2010. This was my last stop before Sarajevo on my tour, as I noted during my post at that time, Pécs, Hungary: Gateway to the Balkans.
It's a university town, loaded with theaters, gorgeous architecture, and the Zsolnay Museum complex, which features all manner of ceramics, as well as leather working and other artisanal items. The Zsolnay family travelled the world learning techniques for ceramics, and innovating on them in ways that are now much imitated nowadays: note the iridescent effect of the eosin glazing on the Art Nouveau vase in the pictures above. So much too feast your eyes on - truly one of my favorite stops from the tour! I'll even make a separate post on the nearby town of Villány, to which I made a side-trip. Then it'll be on to Sarajevo, so keep your eyes peeled! And be sure to follow me on Facebook! Revisiting the 2014 trip that turned into the book Travels with Ferdinand, the second stop is Martin, Slovakia's historical capital of culture, where I taught English from 1990-92. During the second academic year, I joined a civic chorus, Martinský spevokol. After a season of performing at various cultural events in Slovakia, as well as participating in a choral festival in neighboring Hungary, we had a goulash party in June 1992. You can read about my 2014 reunion in my book, where the goulash party forms the kernel of Chapter 2.
You can see my original post about the 2014 event here. I'm providing pictures above, including an illustration of the path of the 2014 trip. I've also added a pic from the goulash party I attended back in 1992, which was a farewell for me. This is the first in a series of posts retracing the trip I made to commemorate the outbreak of WWI. The posts will mainly be pics from that journey, things not included in the book. Click on the photo(s) to purchase Travels with Ferdinand.
These pictures show where the tour began, once I got settled in to Prague. It's Franz Ferdinand's castle, about a 45-minute train ride from Prague. For the centenary of his assassination, the museum had a display called "Together in Life and Death," about him and his wife Marie Chotek. Konopiště is also where I begin my narrative, having a late lunch in the restaurant of the complex with two Australians I met on the train. That first chapter also states the goal of my journey: to travel to as many of Austria-Hungary's successor state while observing the commemorations of the events that led to WWI. I'm also in Europe to meet old friends and relive old times. I also recall Jewish-Austsrian writer Stefan Zweig's memoir The World of Yesterday, and how the Great War led to that world crumbling during Zweig's lifetime. When I landed in Prague on June 18, 2014 and hit the road blogging, I didn’t know – at least not for sure – that the trip would turn into a book. Yet that “World of Yesterday—Today” tour was what started me on the long road to publication. The goal of that journey was to see how the countries of the former Habsburg Monarchy recalled the events of a century before. That nostalgic view also leaned heavily on Jewish-Austrian writer Stefan Zweig’s memoir, The World of Yesterday, hence the name of the tour.
When I got home, I had intended to weave vignettes from that journey into a broader memoir, an Austro-Hungarian Rhapsody (now a work-in-progress). I ended up honing the stories from the 2014 trip into Travels with Ferdinand. When it was ready, I entered a couple of contests, then in January 2020 I got a call that I had won the Panther Creek Nonfiction Book Award from Hidden River Press. COVID delayed publication, but a patient and long-suffering attitude has finally borne fruit! I will begin a series of blog posts on the trip, with pics and recollections mostly NOT found in the book, beginning June 18. For readers not familiar with this whole project, here is a summary: Travels with Ferdinand and Friends: A Centennial Journey Through Austria-Hungary The narrative begins at Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s castle outside Prague and winds through Slovakia, Hungary, and Croatia to Sarajevo, Bosnia & Herzegovina for the 100th anniversary of the assassination that sparked World War I. The culinary and musical exploration of former Habsburg lands continues up the Dalmatian Coast, to the Italian city of Trieste, and on to Vienna, Slovakia and Prague. It includes visits with choirs in Slovakia that the author sang in during his six years living there, as well as spontaneous restaurant performances with musicians in Dubrovnik and Prague. The work entertains while providing an experiential guide to the history and geography of Central Europe and its culture: music, cuisine, language, and literature. It reflects on the causes of the Great War from the standpoints of various nationalities (and their prejudices), as well as changes in the European political landscape from the end of WWI, through WWII and the socialist era, and down to the present day. Set against the broader European backdrop of Putin’s 2014 Crimea annexation, Travels with Ferdinand provides vital context for understanding Ukraine’s western neighbors, the current state of the EU, and the ongoing Russia-Ukraine conflict. You can purchase your copy at Bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble or Amazon. Penguin Bookshop of Pittsburgh also sells it online. It is available on the local authors' shelf at The Book Bin of Onley, Virginia, my hometown bookstore. It's been nearly ten years since I performed for this feast day, back when I played guitar in Coro Ángel based in Cape Charles on Virginia's Eastern Shore. Back then, we went on two separate years to play at St. Gregory the Great in Virginia Beach. We'd process from the gym of the school down a long hallway as we played instruments including a requinta (a smaller guitar tuned at a fifth above), and a six-string acoustic bass with a gourd-like body. People in festive outfits would clap and sing as we made our way into the vestibule, then the sanctuary. The evening Mass was followed by a reception of about 500 people back in the gymnasium, replete with the chocolaty-spicy mole sauce, among other special tastes from Mexico. This year was my first occasion to celebrate the feast day as an organist, and largely in English, though I did sing the bilingual hymn "Pan de Vida." I also composed the setting for the responsorial Psalm - in this case a short reading from Judith - as there is little in the way of published music for the English-language verses. Quite proud to have played my part.
Ludwig van Beethoven's baptismal record of 17 December 1770 does not state his date of birthday, and Beethoven himself never was sure of the exact day. My local classical station, WHRO of Hampton Rhodes, Virginia celebrated on the 16th.
Anyway, it's hard to come up with a fitting tribute to a composer who gave us so much. I remember learning "Für Elise" and "Moonlight Sonata" as a child. In college I became enamored of his symphonies, especially his Ninth - all the more so as I was learning German and the final choral movement had that awe-inspiring verse by Romantic poet Friedrich Schiller, "Ode an die Freude." I revelled in the paean to human brotherhood: Alle Menschen werden Brüder -"all men become brothers." I was aware of many of Beethoven's struggles in life, his abusive father, his rejections in love, and the deafness of his final years. And this "Ode to Joy" represents such a triumph over those difficulties. Never lose hope, it reminds me. It was about this time that the Berlin Wall came down, and the unity expressed in the Ninth seemed poised to finally take over the world. I finished my college graduation requirements that fall of 1989 and felt like I was joining the throngs in the chorus, marching forward, feuertrunken, "drunk with fire," in Schiller's words. For New Year's 1990, Leonard Bernstein conducted the Ninth at the Berlin Wall, quite fittingly. And in October I departed for Europe, for the former East Bloc, to assist with the adjustments to newfound freedoms, on the day Bernstein died. I learned of it on a CNN broadcast projected onto the plane's movie screen. On a flight to Vienna, appropriately enough. As I spent most of the 1990s in Central Europe, I sang in choruses and visited sites where various composers had lived, worked and died: Mozart's and Smetana's birthplaces, concert halls in Prague, Vienna and Budapest, the Prague cemetery in Vyšehrad where both Dvořák and Smetana are buried. Somehow I never have made it to Vienna's Centralfriedhof, site of Beethoven's grave. But I have been to the Beethovenfries in the Secession Building, that palace of art nouveau. Gustav Klimt painted his visual interpretation of the Ninth in the basement, with one movement taking up each wall. That was in the summer of 2000, when I also visited Beethoven's old apartment in Heiligenstadt, today a Viennese neighborhood. Since Israeli conductor Daniel Barenboim is one of today's leading proponents of Beethoven's legacy. He also founded, along with Edward Said, the West-East Divan Orchestra, a group composed mainly of instrumentalists of various Middle-Eastern backgrounds. What could be a better paean to peace and our common humanity than their playing the Ninth together? I've embedded a YouTube video of the final movement, as well as one of Barenboim's commentary on Beethoven's genius. The last couple of weeks have contained four somber anniversaries: the RFK assassination, the Tiananmen Square Massacre, the Trianon Treaty, and the Czech retributions against ethnic German civilians in Postoloprty. It’s not my desire to emphasize the negative, so I’ll try to emphasize the lessons that can be learned.
Personally, I don’t have much to say about RFK, so I’ll leave that to others. On Tiananmen: I was nearing the end of college, full of hope that the student protests would lead to serious reforms. My college job was as a bellman at the Boar’s Head Inn in Charlottesville, and I learned about the suppression of the protests as I was “on the floor,” wandering between the reception desk and restaurant entrance, where a large TV in a lounge area carried the sad news. But there was a glimmer of hope globally: Poland had conducted its first (reasonably) free elections, and non-communist candidates had done surprisingly well at the polls. Hungarian officials had begun cutting down the border fence with Austria, which helped lead to the Fall of the Berlin Wall that autumn. The Czech press reported on an event of 75 years ago: in a town called Postoloprty, about an hour northwest of Prague, at least 763 Germans were tortured, killed and thrown into mass graves. Much of the Czech population had harbored a simmering grievance, as the town was annexed to the Third Reich, along with the rest of the Sudetenland, in 1938, and the German-speaking population had mostly welcomed the move. Of course this sort of vengeance solves nothing. But the fact that Czechs are willing to examine this history is encouraging. There had been an inquiry into the massacre in 1947, as well as exhumation of the bodies, which gives us the 763 figure. Czech and German historians conducted a joint study of the issue in 1996, and a committee from the Louny region of Bohemia examined the event yet again in 2009. This leads to the Treaty of Trianon defining Hungary’s post-World War I borders, which was signed a hundred years ago. The former Kingdom of Hungary lost 72% of its territory, including all of present-day Slovakia and considerable portions of Croatia, Serbia and Romania. Even Austria was awarded a strip of western Hungary, including the town of Eisenstadt/Kismarton and Sopron/Ödenburg. Only after locals forced authorities to allow a plebiscite did Sopron become reattached to Hungary, in accordance with the will of the people. This was the only town that managed to do so. While most of those areas were majority-non-Magyar, some of them, such as a swath of southern Hungary, remain majority-Hungarian to this day. Hungarians became Europe’s largest minority living beyond the borders of the mother country. This became a major source of resentment among ethnic Magyars. There are questions about why Hungary should have lost so much territory; however, I give no quarter to Magyar revanchists. I also have little patience with Hungary allowing ethnic Magyars in neighboring countries to vote in Hungarian elections, which has encouraged the growth of nationalist parties with revanchist agendas. Another concern is that the successor states respect the rights of the Hungarian minorities. Since 1990, Slovakia has passed a number of language laws asserting the use of Slovak as the official tongue. Most have been too sweeping in my opinion. One from the mid-1990s could have been interpreted as calling for the punishment of two bus drivers speaking Hungarian just between themselves from the windows of their vehicles. Many Slovaks insist that it should be prohibited to use Hungarian names for Slovak towns, such as Pozsony for Bratislava and Kassa for Košice. I would say that forcing them to speak their language incorrectly is a violation of human rights. It's a rather long complicated history. I have covered these issues in a series of three articles on the downfall of the Habsburg Monarchy. The End of World War I and of Austria-Hungary: But the Tragedy Continues The Troubles of (Dividing) Empire Austria-Hungary's Nations: From Resentment to Reconciliation? I just belatedly learned that today is the 100th anniversary of the birth of John Paul II. About the only thing I can say that hasn’t already been said, is how my life has been affected by him.
No one knows how long the Cold War might have continued were it not for his influence in bringing down the regimes of the Warsaw Pact. But it was precisely in his native Poland that the first free elections in East-Central Europe were held in May 1989, leading rapidly to waves of emigration and protests in other countries that culminated in the Fall of the Berlin Wall and the Velvet Revolution. So it is doubtful that I would have ventured to then-Czechoslovakia in 1990—a highly influential time in my life, coming on the heels of college graduation—had it not been for his role in inspiring Polish Catholics to struggle for religious freedom and a government more responsive to the needs and will of the people. In addition to befriending both Lutherans and Catholics in Slovakia, and coming to understand the struggles they had faced with the old regime, I observed a tangible resurgence in faith, a new flowering in the cultural sphere. One that was also necessary to counteract the freight train of consumerism, with its spiritual nihilism, barreling their way. The one time I got so see that pontiff in person was in October 1994, when I took a bus trip with a Slovak chorus – a civic rather than religious group, but one with a considerable repertoire of sacred music. And we travelled on a shoestring, nearly 40 of us on a bus, travelling from 6 AM on a Saturday morning, sleeping as the vehicle rolled through the Alps and down the Apennine peninsula, finally arriving before noon to sing in a side chapel of St. Peter’s Basilica. The Mass was celebrated by a Slovak priest, who would also be our guide during our five days in Rome. We visited sites including the Institute of Sts. Cyril and Methodius, a Slovak organization founded by refugees of the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion. But the highlight was seeing John Paul II on St. Peter’s Square, at a Wednesday audience. He rode in the Popemobile down the aisles arranged among the thousands of folding chairs, waving to the crowds. After ascending the white steps under the front façade of the basilica, he gave a brief homily. Then he greeted various groups, acknowledging each country and nationality in each given language. Many other choirs had come. When an English group gave a particularly enthusiastic response, standing and cheering, he said, “I encourage you to sing.” And so they sang a hymn. And then our Slovak group got its turn, singing the stately “V sedmobrežnom kruhu Ríma,” the Slovak papal hymn. The bishop of Banská Bystrica was present, along with other clergy and seminarians, and I felt oddly privileged to be among such a group of Slovaks – even if many choir members, like me, were not Catholic. At least I wasn’t yet Catholic, but still discerning. Despite my Slovak connections, the most inspiring thing I witnessed at this event was the multinational crowd, each group singing and cheering in its own tongue, each proud of its own identity. Yet all relished their roles as part of an organic body. I continued my discernment until John Paul’s death in 2005. I got up at 4 AM to watch his funeral live from Columbus, Ohio. I’d read in the days since his passing about how Poles had travelled to the Eternal City in trains and buses, on sleepless journeys with little money, and recalled the similar way I’d gone there with the Slovak choir. As the crowds held aloft signs in various language, the Italians with their “Santo subito!” banners and white-and-red Polish flags everywhere, I reveled in the universality of the display, transported back to St. Peter’s Square as I’d seen it on that day in 1994. It was then I knew I had to become a Catholic – and I did so the following Easter. In the years since, I’ve learned more and more about the underground Church in Eastern Europe, about the life of John Paul, including his efforts to clean the stains of historical anti-Semitism. I’ve read his Memory and Identity—in both English and Polish—and understand his desire that Europe might “breathe with both lungs,” that is, overcome its East-West divisions. Those projects have never been completely fulfilled, but I hope that, by my writing and music, among other endeavors, I can do my small part in bringing about the understanding among peoples that was so central to John Paul II’s life. |
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June 2023
Musical & Literary Wanderings of a Galloping GypsyMark Eliot Nuckols is a travel writer from Silver Beach Virginia who is also a musician and teacher. Categories
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