connection, there is no need to prove it.
It is my hope that, in spite of all the drawbacks, the following ac-
count leaves more pleasant than unpleasant experiences in read-
ers. Maybe, if the text is not considered good enough by everyone,
the pictures can compensate for its shortages.
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PART I
Chapter 1 Home Landscape
Before I began -- either from my will or led by my fate -- to make
trips, my parents and events in history helped me to get into more
distant corners of our country (the sizes of which I mean in the cor-
responding time). When I was three months old I got to the south-
eastern corner of Transsylvania by my father's customs officer job
and the Munich II Treaty. Northern Transsylvania switched back to
us by the treaty got its state officials from the mother country, so my
father was assigned there too. It's unnecessary to say that what I
know about that country and its inhabitants I haven't learned myself
personally, as my whole family joined the flow of refugees before I
became three, so I couldn't have any memory of the visited villages
that time.
In 1947, when I was six, my father lost his job at the Gyöngyös
office of customs authority that had been reorganized after the war.
He had no alternative than move with his family to Fonyód on the
southern shore of the lake Balaton, the living place of his relatives
including several sisters and brothers. As we have been living there
for nine years, affection for the "sea of Hungary" has been sucked
up by me that time.
Those distant memories freshen up also the injustices at the
beginning of the '50s that were most easily sensed in small villages
in the country, of which mainly such things got through to me that my
mother took me with her to the woods to collect fallen wood for the
winter, or sometimes we had to pick up a little cooking oil by bread
from the bottom of plates for a lunch -- at least there was oil and
bread. However, an intellectual child could also sense that he was
not accepted by the village kids for his being different. While they
envied him for the easiness he could learn embraced by a family of
broader than average education, they wanted to balance that dis-
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Home landscape
advantage with their physical force or powerful connections, and
not omitted a single opportunity to humiliate him.
From among my memories the most powerful are those storing
the wonderful, arresting beauty of that country. The lake Balaton
has a thousand faces, first of all that can be seen from the top of the
high loess abyss on hot summer days, when the surface of water,
green otherwise, reflects the pale sky; and when the sun is hiding
behind clouds, the whole area becomes gray like a metallic plate,
but it retains its shine as before. During fall, as two-foot waves are
wipped up by the north-westerly wind, you feel only the force of wind
up there, but with such an intensity that twigs thrown out over the
precipice spring upwards and come back like boomerangs onto the
head of the caster. The color of water remains dark gray below low-
flying clouds of the same shade, and the line of waves following
each-other in thirty to fifty feet in a regular pattern can be seen to the
farther. The waves turn to white breakers nearing the flat shore.
This phenomenon produces the wonderful gray quartz sand on this
side of the lake. Alas, it is gone almost completely now that the lake
has been locked into a concrete trough since the sixties; this time
you can only smell rotten deposit, the sand stays at the bottom;
earlier sand was let down by water that flew back empty and clean,
lighter deposit made some more trips up and down and at last it
landed there too as free prey for small living creatures.
So many things you could find there in such cool, windy autumn
days. Mainly they have been mussels -- one species of them comes
from petrified broken shells of small mussels resembling fallen
hoofs of goats, they are called goat-claw -- and empty shells of tiny
snails, but once I have found a badly damaged toy boat. It has been
the first of my model boats in a long line. Then “Robinson Crusoe”
and “Mistery Island” were fresh in my brain and I wanted to try, at
least in miniature, how to build a boat. This first one I have repaired
and enhanced in all ways and until our moving from the village it has
been an item to decorate my room. He who decides for a walk along
the shore in such a weather, may count on that nobody disturbs him
until he gets home, or turns into the pub to take some spirit-warmer.
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Those who live on the lake cannot avoid taking part in ex-
cursions, as a child, with fellow pupils, as an adult, with his friends or
his family. This involves mainly boarding a boat and crossing the
lake by it. Well that other shore! What a fine sight! The extinct
volcanoes in a long line. Finest of them all is the coffin-shaped hill
called Badacsony. On an average day in the summer or early fall the
line of hills is tinted deep blue by the mist rising from the surface of
water, the woods, vineyards and wineries -- called in our language
squeezing huts -- cannot be seen clearly. But, when an anti-cyclone
sweeps the vapour away, it looks as if the hills had waded the flat
water of the lakeshore to come over to this side, you have the feel-
ing, you can touch them. The four miles between you and them dis-
solves. You can see all clearly from the white boat at the wharf
puffing up black smoke as it starts its 20-minute trip to Fonyód, to
the tiny sailboats and angler boats, to the fine gardens of the well-to-
do people a little higher on the slope and, even higher on the
hillside, the huge vineyards, their "squeezing huts" having survived many centuries in the same style, eventually turned into living
quarters.
The original forest of oak, beech and many other species that
covers the hilltop as well as the collar of 300 feet below that can be
seen as crystal in such a fine weather. Even people walking on the
dirt roads are seen unmistakable, you can even tell, who they are, if
you know them.
According to geologists, the hill of Badacsony has been created
by a natural, however rare phenomenon: three nearby volcanoes in
a line had so many lava erutions that the solidifying magma filled the
gaps completely up, only the three humps on the top shows you
where the original cones stood. The hilly landscape from Szigliget
to Tihany has its many volcanic cones in a rugged line, from South-
west to Northeast. The finest vineyards lie on the slopes going out to
the lake Balaton on the south-eastern side. On the other side the
climate is not so favourable, the wine got from there is not so
tasteful. The solidifying lava at the north-eastern end of the hill has
built wonderful stone columns, they look as giant humps of pan-
14
Home landscape
cakes. From his nature man saw in them less the natural beauty
than money: large amounts of the basalt has been quarried out to
use it at railway beds. I used to hear the sound of explosion several
times a day when I was a child. This time the remaining basalt is in
safety, since 1964 there is no quarrying any more.
There is another lava park on the other end of the oval hill, but
there has been no quarry there, here stand a high stone cross. You
can see it from the other shore in clear weather. The walk up to the
hilltop is a good exercise, sometimes you have to climb steps.
The southern shore of the lake is low county, there are only
three hills there, two of them in Fonyód, the third one in Balaton-
boglár. The hills in Fonyód make a really good empression on you
only, when you are sailing on the lake and the sun is going low. The
double hills are well illuminated and that on the right side shows you
the white loess wall. It is brilliant white then. Otherwise both hills are
partly covered by woods. On hot summer days it is most pleasant to
sit on benches along walkways in the woods.
The two hills in Fonyód had a guardian role some thousand
years ago. They safeguarded the entrance of the narrow bay open-
ing from the lake to the Southeast, until it became locked and
separated from the main body by the silt driven there by the domin-
ant north-westerly wind. The isolated independent pond with no
feed or drain were made first wetland, swamp by the natural de-
velopment process of lakes, then bog and moor at last. Although the
last drop of water has been pumped out, this land is still called
Nagyberek, i.e. The Big Moor. When I was a child, people used to
produce peat, as it was still in a bog state. The ponds left open after
peat production looked like filled with red wine instead of water.
Then, as the water level in the lake Balaton usually dropped in the
summer season, because water from the lake fed the canal of Sió,
being the waterway for boats up and down between the Balaton and
river Danube, the red peat juice drained into the lake to the last drip.
Today the moor is a fine agricultural land.
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The shores around the lake Balaton is fine for recreation, but
only in the summer season. The inhabitants, however, live there
during winter too. In winter it is a very boring place, except the ice of
the lake. When I was living there, people used it for fishing under it,
also reed has been cut above the hard ice surface with machines,
not mentioned the special ice-sledge -- called in Hungarian a
"wooden dog" -- that looks like a high stool from grandfather's dining room attached to a sledge-chassis and driven by long rods with
nails in the end. Well, it can reach a considerable speed, until its
driver is lucky enough not to find a wide gap in the ice. Ice has also
been used for storage for the summer. Actually, the lake Balaton is
no hit during winter. Life is not easy, either. The glossy surface lets
the air flow freely, always there is a strong wind, and it is very cold
when temperature is below zero. You find it hard to tell where is
water and where is land, it looks alike.
During my years of life on the lake Balaton the traffic of trains
was not very dense, although the village lies on a magistral line be-
tween Budapest and Nagykanizsa, even a side-line starts from here
to Kaposvár, the seat of Somogy county. This is almost completely
true today, trains are not really numerous. There was only a short
period during the 60's, when, if you missed a train, you had better
hurry in the refreshment room with your beer, so as not to repeat the
mistake with the next one. Well there is one difference, it is not the
same to have there steam engines like those in my time there, or
Diesel engines. Nowadays, that electrifying is complete on that line,
there go up-to-date electric trains to my old place and further. Of
course, it has developed into a town of twelve thousand from the
three thousand inhabitants earlier.
Fonyód's upward climb began with its becoming a district seat in
1950, the village has beaten the neighbouring Balatonboglár at it,
the eternal rival. District, as a notion in administration in our country
has vanished already, but the population and living standard of the
settlement has been rising until today. Beside the eight-class
elementary school, I have learned in, there is a secondary school
too. Good Luck for people in Fonyód as before!
16
Home landscape
Of all the other settlements on the lake Balaton, although I know
most of them, I became acquainted with Siófok best. Nearly one
and a half year I have spent in the comprehensive secondary school
"Perczel Mór" there during 1955/56. The town is frequently named
also the capital of the Balaton, but this title is more apt for Keszthely
at the lower end of the lake. Siófok has rather become lately the
capital of another activity, namely that of the underground society of
organised crime.
I have been living in Budapest since I was fifteen. About this
metropolis it is very hard to tell a new detail to anybody, and I don't
want to rob the precious time of my readers by listing my im-
pressions. The only opinion worth expressing is that the city has
developed as much in this 40-plus years I spent here as during its
whole history. Alas, it brought with itself the negative sidekicks too.
One example of these changes only: I have lived with my wife in a
small rented room for six years at the start of our marriage; during
that time or rather the last three years of it our neighbourhood
turned a living estate with prefabricated concrete blocks from the
suburban district of one-family garden houses; we moved then into
our own flat also built up during that three years; it was all so new
that public works involved only our living estate of four-storied
blocks called the KISZ (Hungarian Youth Association) estate of the
eighteenth district of Budapest. It grew up beside the so called State
Estate built in 1941 for the Hungarian fugitives coming home to the
mother country from Transsylvania following a twenty-year long
isolation. On its other side there was a large meadow, and still
farther the planted municipal woods. Part of the woods was occupi-
ed by a clay hole producing raw material for the brick factory nearby.
The factory is gone, on its place stands now the out-patients' clinic.
Today the woods is framed and penetrated by roads. Part of the
meadow has been wetland, almost a swamp with frogs and sedge
and reed. A big bullfrog was freed there, which was given to my son
by a sarcastic fishmonger for a "living barometer". The only hitch
has been that it was no green frog. This time the same place keeps
my cabinet with the PC on it, as it is my employer's office in one of
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the buildings of Gloriette estate.
Parádsasvár, a small village in one of the valleys of the Mátra
mountain is the place whit what I became acquainted a short time
after my moving to Budapest. I was 16 then. The highest place I met
so far was the hill Badacsony. Mátra is my favourite of all domestic
mountains still. For the trip I had to thank to one of my aunts. She
spent her summers usually in small country settlements, she had a
constant correspondence with her acquaintances in the country.
That time, in the 50's, it was not very expensive to spend two weeks
in a lost place, and she did it actually. She wanted company and for
this reason she took me and another young boy there. For the
owners of the house it was a lucky surplus income and they
provided us with fine Hungarian country food.
The village lies near to the town of Parád where there is a
sanatorium for illnesses of the digestive tract. In the nearby runs to
the surface the spring Csevice, the healing water that is used by the
sanatorium too. Since ancient times the water has been everyone's
property, but now it is monopolised by the state sanatorium, the
spring is caged up and its product is sold on place and bottled in the
whole country. Locals get bonuses for such a quantity of water they
cannot consume all covered. The water has a little carbon dioxide
too, but its chief characteristic is the sulphurous compound unbear-
able for anybody trying it first time. Something like old beer mixed
with rotten eggs. Anyway, you can get used to it step-by-step, just
like to nicotine. At last you don't want to drink ordinary water, it has
neither taste, nor smell.
There are two attractions of the neighbouring country beside
the spring. One of them is the Mátra with the odd majestic forest.
You can bear the cool air in the shade under the giant trees even in
hot summer days. Vegetation withholds also moist, even during the
driest months mushrooms grow there. And when they grow almost
everywhere, here you don't have to search for them, they tease you
from the roadside. Only here could I find emperor agaric that had
been the favourite for emperor Claudius. Mátra remained the wild-
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Home landscape
est and most romantic land in the country in spite of the fact that two
big towns are quite near, Gyöngyös and Eger.
There is one more attraction worth visiting. That is the glass
factory. I saw it first in the '50s with the original technology present,
all products were made manually, or rather pneumally (I mean by
lungs). Some years later everything was modernised, but their trad-
itional supply needed manual production. So they returned to man-
ual methods, but on a much higher level, on the conditions of today.
Almost all of the factory's products go abroad, hardly anything
remains here, it is the old song: abroad there are customers with a
greater buying capacity, even artistic handwork can be paid for.
More than ten years later I managed to spend some time in the
Mátra again. I have got a bonus from the trade union and went there
with my wife for recreation, including a lot of kilometres on excurs-
ions by foot. Following those days we made some more trips there,
our rented room had little power to keep us home. Some develop-
ment we have seen, but the forest hasn't changed anything.
As I mentioned already, the village lies near to Parád, where
there is a sanatorium within the castle in the old mansion. An un-
equalled sight is that of the stable and the village-museum. In the
village there is even a wood-cutting artist of their own, he is Joaquin
the Carpenter and his works are uniquely rustic.
Well, as I have reported, the lake Balaton has a special cache in
my heart of all natural phenomena and geographical places, but in
my youth before finishing my studies at the university I went fre-
quently with my close friend Zoltán to the shore of another small
lake, that of Velence situated around halfway between Budapest
and the lake Balaton. Even later, such trips were possible for us with
my family, as there were summer houses on the shore belonging to
our relatives. This small pond in a later phase of development for
natural bodies of water is no match for Balaton, of course, but it has
some advantages compared to its sister. One of these is the pro-
ximity of the capital for those coming here only for a day's beaching.
More than that is the more abundant fish for anglers.
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During my student years, in 1961 I decided to be a member of
the Hungarian Youth Association (KISZ). As a new member, I was
drawn in at once into a building camps program that summer. Some
years earlier the state started that movement and it became a
widely accepted youth program to that time. The first such camp
was organised in 1958 with the aim of draining the swamp Hanság
in the west of the country to gain good agricultural lands (recently
the process has been turned back, as no good land has been gain-
ed and some species of rare birds and mammals disappeared from
our country). Another camp has been organised for the groundwork
of the Vác cement factory. My opportunity has been to take part in
the digging of the groundwork of the would-be chemical works in
Berente.
On the opposite to my expectations, life in the camp has not
been unpleasant. I knew physical work, I did it sometimes during my
summer vacations, and company was excellent. It was a rather long
program, it lasted four weeks in July. Our camp was exclusively for
boys, girls in such camps had to do easy work.
Berente was a microscopic-size village at the town of Kazinc-
barcika. Rather, it has been part of the town in the administrative
sense. Its landscape, the valley of the small river Sajó, is beautiful,
although at that time we could feel already the effect of the would-be
large complex. Anyway, I can advise it to those who like hilly country
with some woods.
The river Danube has been keeping me a captive of its wonder-
ful, wild beauty, since I have known it. Alas, today its environment is
so contaminated that the river cannot fulfil the traditional expect-
ations for recreation, sports or fishing. Forty or fifty years ago how-
ever, the situation was quite different, or, rather, it has not been so
widely known, what contamination means, how great danger
threatens those trying to take their time in a dirty environment.
Following directly the camping in Berente, I spent a month working
as a machinist on board the passenger steamboat "Kossuth". This
employment came with my drawing a scholarship fee from the ship-
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Home landscape
ping line MAHART. This month I recollect a little later.
I left this job at the end of August that year and, as I still have
around ten days to the beginning of my next, fifth semester.
Accidentally, my friend, Zoltán was also free to come with me, we
decided to board a boat on the river and steam to the town of Baja to
spend some days and nights in our tent in the fine early September
weather swimming, sunning. For easier movement I took my bi-
cycle with us.
It has been a very pleasant week except one thing. One morn-
ing we discovered that during the night someone stole my bike. It
was confusing as around dawn, when I went out to relieve, it was
still on its place. It was gone forever.
Otherwise, as I mentioned it, the holiday has been pleasant.
There is a backwater canal called Sugovica making an isle near to
the centre of the town, it is named after our national poet Sándor
Petõfi. This backwater is in connection with the complex canal
system, which was created after the Freedom Fight of 1848/49 and
later, during the Monarchy, to connect the small settlements along
the Danube and further to the river Tisza by waterways. Sugovica
itself has been used to this day as wintering place for boats, it needs
a lot of cleaning by dredges. As the water flows only with a moderate
speed, the sediment is very fine sand. At the time we were there the
bottom was freshly dredged, the shore was covered by many
thousands of cubic feet of fine sand. In the mild weather this sand
became warm, it looked like a beach on the South Seas. We called it
the Sahara for its extent and clean white sand.
It is almost impossible to recognise the same place today. I had
the chance to see it some decades after my pleasant stay when
business brought me there again. Neither the Sahara, nor the virgin
state that I had experienced there. The isle is a busy recreation
centre of the town today.
Of the mountainous landscapes of the country my next favourite
location is the mountain Bükk. Alas, I don't know the whole mount-
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ain, it would have needed more time than I had, or I would have to
move to Miskolc to live there. It is the same you can tell about
theLouvre: you must work in that institution to learn all that is
important about it. Otherwise it is an empty boast that somebody
knows it.
The two factors that made me travelling in the country possible
were my first employer after getting my diploma and my first flat
after marriage. MAHART provided its employees with the opportun-
ity of cheap travel by train and river boats, while my rented room at
the same time has not been attractive, we left it alone as long as we
could. That time our country had few good quality railway lines, the
only such line (with a final stop that could be considered a fitting
target) has been that for Mickolc. The Lillafüred Express took us
there in less than two hours. Miskolc in itself is no interesting town,
but it has the nearby resorts of Miskolc-Tapolca and Lillafüred. The
latter was our favourite excursion aim. A narrow-gauge railway took