By James T. Carney
[Sequel to "Ljublijana"]
The next morning we walked around Ljublijana a little more, going off to view remnants of the old Roman wall that surrounded the original Roman encampment. Then we took the train to Budapest without even having lunch—something that we lived to regret since there was neither food nor drink during our eight-and-a-half-hour journey. (European trains are not very fast—or weren’t in 2004.) For the first two hours of the trip, we shared a railroad car with a young woman who was completing a degree in chemical engineering at Maribod, which is the second largest city in Slovenia, in the eastern part of the country.) She spoke excellent English and we learned a good deal about Slovenia.
Slovenia struck me as an extremely prosperous country, which has the advantage of being populated almost exclusively by Slovenes—some Italians in the West and a few Hungarians in the East but basically just Slovenes. It was very clean, except for omnipresent graffiti—something that was true for Hungary and Slovakia as well. I am not sure what to make of that except to think that people who are used to resisting the government may find it hard to recognize the need to change behaviors when they are the government.
Another interesting thing was the number of blondes in both Slovenia and Slovakia. In Hungary one saw fewer blondes and fewer artificial red heads. Hungarian women had some tendency to be short, squat, and ugly. (In Eastern Europe one has to be pro Slav or pro Magyar.) Actually, I think that the dissolution of old Austria (Austria proper, Bohemia, Moravia, and Slovenia) was one of the great mistakes of President Wilson. Relatively speaking, the minorities in these countries—i.e., the non-Germans—were treated fairly well under the ancien regime, which viewed them all as subjects of the Hapsburgs as opposed to nationalities. They were also significantly intermixed, which means that they had boundaries that don’t match the peoples—i.e., in Austrian Carinthia there is a huge Slovenian population that voted to stay with Austria rather than join Jugoslavia after the first World War, and in the Sudentland in the Czech Republic, it took ethnic cleansing after World War II to get the Germans out.
Well, we finally arrived at Budapest to find the only place we could get any dinner was a Gyro shop (although I did get some pivo in a grocery store.) If you ever go to Budapest, you should remember that you will be fined if you throw away the subway ticket before you leave the subway station, as happened to one poor Romanian we met on the subway.
We had only two days in Budapest and we enjoyed every minute of them. Budapest is one of those places that you could happily spend a week between touring and take a couple of side trips such as a day trip on the Danube. The people did not seem as happy as the Slovenes (although the phrase happy Hungarian may be an oxymoron). Certainly, everything looked more prosperous than when I had been there in 1989. We started off our first day with a visit to the Parliament Building (my picture of Budapest in my old office shows the Parliament Building taken from across the Danube). It was an extremely impressive building, which we toured. It is dominated by a statute of Lajos Kossuth in front—Kossuth led the Hungarian Revolution of 1848. Kossuth was like many Hungarians: a Slovak by birth who learned Magyar and thus became a Hungarian. (Actually, that approach to nationality is almost American in nature, which is about the only Magyar trait that could be conceived of as American.) The definition of a dumb Hunkie is a Slovak too stupid to learn Magyar. Freedom for Magyars meant oppression for everyone else. Destroying old Austria was Wilson’s mistake; destroying old Hungary was Wilson’s success. Not that the Magyars have given up on their claims to the lands of the Crown of St. Stephen—indeed, in the lower house of parliament they still show the coats of arms of Hungary along with Croatia, Dalmatia, Transylvania, etc. They don’t show the coat of arms of Slovakia because they do not even recognize it as separate from old Hungary. On the last, they have a valid point since Hungary has included Slovakia since the 11th century. We saw the crown of St. Stephen, which had been moved in a coronation ceremony from the museum (where it was when I saw it in 1989) to the very center of the Parliament Building.
From Parliament, we walked down the Danube to the Chain Bridge and crossed to the Budapest side of the city.
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| Budapest bridge view |
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| Roman ruins in Budapest |
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| Bullet holes from the 1956 Hungarian revolution |
That night we took a boat trip for about two hours down the Danube. That was really beautiful. We had talked about taking an all-day boat trip but did not have the time to do so. Because of scarcity of time, we dined at Pizza Hut that day. The next morning we started off going to see the plaza containing the statutes of the major Hungarian rulers starting with St. Stephen. We also climbed the hill that is the site of the great monument to the liberating Soviet army (in World War II) showing ironically a statute of freedom accompanied by a statute of a Russian solder. The latter has been removed to a special amusement park that is full of statutes from the Communist regime—a joke. By Parliament there is a Hungarian flag from the Communist regime (which is the same as the old Hungarian flag minus the hammer and cycle in the middle). This flag had a hole in it where the hammer and sickle insignia had been cut out. Ironically, this hill had been the site of the original Celtic settlement in Budapest as well as the Roman settlement. It was the site of a fort the Austrians had built there in 1848 after the Hungarian revolt had been crushed with the help of the Russians. The Hungarians were developing a museum there that will be very interesting when it was finished. The hill is known as St. Gelbert’s Hill after a bishop who was an ally of St. Stephen and who got thrown off the hill by some disgruntled constituents.
From there we made it back to the train station and took the 6:00 PM train to Košice. This time, we brought our own supply of pivo on board. Returning to the culinary interests, we did not eat any Hungarian food, which was unfortunate because there were some very fine restaurants in Budapest. I did get Hungarian pastry a couple of times, which was very good and helped keep me going. However, I was able to make up any deficiencies when I was in Slovakia.
Next Tuesday: Košice
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Copyright © 2013 by James T. Carney
| Please comment |
James, as always, really appreciate your colorful travelogues. In your travels of the Balkans, have you by any chance formed a theory on why so much warfare seems to occur there, and in many cases, originate there? What do they have that is so worth doing battle over?
ReplyDeleteAbout your reference to redheads in Part I: speaking as the husband of a natural redhead, who has also been involved with a few "bottle" redheads, I can can say that if one is not born with that color hair, it never looks natural, no matter what part of the world. "Bottle" redheads also never become as adept at throwing shoes and other items without warning, so they don't do justice to the hair color or the personality.
Paul, last night James emailed me a reply to your questions:
DeleteSorry that I have been running so far behind on things. Being off for a week and a half in the Adirondacks certainly put me out of circulation for a while and you can imagine how the work piled up at the office.
Here is the best answer I can make to the question from Paul.
Several years ago, my son Jim and I visited Ellis Island and looked at a number of posters from various national groups (Finns, Swedes, etc.) telling new immigrants to contact their society for help including help in learning English and applying for American citizenship. It is clear that America has always been willing to assimilate people from other countries and ethnic backgrounds (albeit not racial and sometimes not religious backgrounds) and in many ways has pushed assimilation to such an extent that the second generation of immigrants has often tried to wipe out any connections with ethnic heritage in the Old World. The result of this is that immigrants and their descendants become Americans first and any other identifications second. For example, Czechoslovakia was created in Pittsburgh by merging two entirely different people (who have since split apart) but whose unity was a political necessity recognized by the descendants of Czechs and Slovaks. The American approach led them to merge their differences for a common good. (Now, this is a long-run view of what is involved in Americanization, and the existence of the Know Nothing Party, etc. clearly indicates that some Americans were not enthused about taking in different ethnic groups, but the view is, in the long run, historically accurate.)
One has to contrast this approach with the approach of the Old World, which, except in the case of the few nation states that represent one nationality, has never had any merging principle. For example, in what is now the Czech Republic the Germans saw themselves as Germans with loyalty to the Reich while the Czechs saw themselves as Czechs with loyalty to their state. The two groups had existed together for several hundred years under the Austrian/Hungarian Empire without ever merging. This situation was duplicated throughout the Balkans, which were characterized (relative to the rest of Europe) with a large number of separate groups with different ethnic/religious identities who have maintained their separate identity throughout history. (The Serbs and the Croats are one people ethnically and linguistically divided by religion.) Each group regards the other as the “stranger” and is always ready to turn on the other(s) given a good opportunity.