How do you remember your first really exciting underwater job?

When the Tropicarium was still being built, I applied as a marine biologist. I was there when it was still a concrete jungle, I was the one who brought in the alligators from Sweden, and received the sharks from Florida. At night I had to carry them under my arm and swim around with them because when they arrived they were so stressed that they couldn't come around immediately, and if they didn't swim they would sink to the bottom of the pool and drown.

Is it dangerous to swim with sharks under your arm?

No. I was bitten by one once, but that was my fault. We had the attraction of feeding them in front of the visitors. Three sharks came from different directions and I let go of the fish too late, so one bit my finger.

Did it have to be sewn back on?

No. He only sank his tooth in it, I couldn't feel my finger for a few months.

I went to the doctor, and when he asked me what had happened, I told him the truth: I had been bitten by a shark. He said I "must be kidding ", and should rather tell him how I had really got hurt.

Lake Balaton is often referred to as the Hungarian sea, but it is still unusual for someone to become a marine biologist in Hungary. How did you decide to choose this profession?

I swam competitively as a kid, then became an adult national team diver, won world championships and European championships, and because I was interested in biology, I decided to become a marine biologist.

Were you filming back then too?

The first global marine survey was carried out in 1997. I was working as an industrial diver in Germany and read the ad there. I went to the Maldives with a group of Swiss biologists. At that time, the area was not so popular among tourists, so when my daughter was at kindergarten and the kindergarten teacher asked her where her daddy was and she told her that he was on Maldives Island, the kindergarten teacher corrected her by saying "that's not Maldives Island, Eszter, it's Margaret Island" (laughs). We had to assess the health of the coral reefs and the damage caused by human activity. At the end of the nineties the reefs were relatively healthy, and then when we returned there was the first big natural disaster that caused serious damage. El Nino came, and it warmed the water so much that ninety percent of the coral died.

When I first saw it, it was full of life, and then it was a Martian landscape.

I got into filming when I took an underwater camera as a hobby with a German colleague and we filmed what we were doing. I took the footage to a film studio and they were very interested in the subject. They said, here's an apprentice editor, sit in the editing room and do what you want. We sat there for a month, I had no idea what I was doing, but then we made a 25-minute film that won two festivals. A couple of years ago I was involved in a special production: we made an interactive program underwater, which was broadcast online. The concept was to have two Australian and one Scottish presenters talking about the local coral reef life. To make it work, I had to drag a 300-meter-long optic cable with me underwater.

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Cayman Islands - Photo: Emil Karáth

How far away from civilization are the areas where you are filming?

In some places, there’s really just us and nature. Just before the pandemic broke out, I was in Papua, where we were filming a documentary. We were warned not to get hurt because there were no telephones, no internet, and no medical help. There are a lot of tiny islands in this area with small, sugarloaf-shaped mountains, and the one with the 'dented center' has a lake in the center of the island. To reach the water, however, we had to climb the mountain, through the jungle, in the pouring rain, over razor-sharp rocks, carrying our torches, cameras, and tripods.

Did everyone survive the adventure?

When my other cameraman colleague dived down to the bottom of the lake, he may have swallowed a drop or two of water.

It must have been poisonous because he was dying for four days and we didn't know what was going to happen to him, but he survived.

I just got an ear infection. They threw us into a pod of 400 dolphins, and it's very exciting to see these animals charging towards you, but they're defecating into the water, and the camera got very dirty. And their faeces are full of bacteria, which caused the infection in my ears, but I got some drops from the captain and after a few days I was back diving again. When we returned with the boat, we found out that a pandemic had broken out. We hadn't even disembarked when a team came on board with masks and a thermometer, and we just watched what was happening. Then we were going to Komodo to film dragons, but that didn't work out because of the virus. However, last August, I found out that they were looking for volunteers for Tanzania and I was involved in a coral repatriation program in Africa.

Has the pandemic made travel difficult?

You could go to Tanzania with a vaccination and a negative PCR test. There we travelled to an island where we shared the area with monkeys only. We had to be careful with them because if we left our clothes outside, they would steal them. They didn't take our shoes, but it was not advisable to leave them outside either, because they liked to poop into them. We lived on top of the baobab tree.

In what condition have you found the corals in Tanzania?

There they fish with dynamite, which leaves behind a lunar landscape. There are pieces of coral, a few centimetres long, which are broken off but still alive, to be collected from the sea floor. The local women weave ropes of coconut fibre to string them on. In nine months, the coral pieces grow so large that they can be taken off the ropes and then, using cement that binds underwater, the divers stick them to the bottom to grow.

Life may come back there in a few decades, but if the fishermen carry on like this, they won't be able to feed their children. That is what they need to be made to understand.

You talk about your dives as calmly as if it was the most natural thing in the world to encounter sharks and alligators. I can't imagine the adrenaline not working in you when you're filming...

Of course it works, but if you know how to behave, no harm will be done. I've dived with sharks many times, and humans are not on their menu. Sometimes they attack them by mistake, but the victims of shark attacks usually die from their wounds, not because the animal ate them. It's not even the dangerous-looking animals that are the most hazardous, but rather the ones that you often don't even notice and still can kill you. For example, the tiny blue-ringed octopus, or the tentacle of the box jellyfish. Clothes protect me for the most part, of course I still often have stings all over my hands and mouth, but they only itch for a few days.

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Maldives - Photo: Emil Karáth

Living the Indiana Jones lifestyle, there must have been times when you were glad to get out of the water alive...

(Thinks about it) There was one. When I was six, I was on holiday at my grandparents' place and I got into the drain of my grandfather's pool. I was glad to get out of the water then because you don't usually survive that.

What happened?

The drainpipe sucked me down. By that time there were not many visitors in the swimming pool, but they let us in and I was curious to see how the water went down, I got too close - and I went down. The pipe ends in a stream, but there's a settling pit in between.

I was lucky that the sluice was raised enough for me to get under it because if I couldn't get under it, it was all over. I thought I was going to die.

Luckily I was able to stand up in the pit, the water was up to my chest, and I was shouting from under a cover. Two ladies pulled me out, and since I was floating in a concrete pipe, I had practically no skin left, I was dripping blood, and they took me to my grandparents. I spent the whole summer like a mummy, wrapped in gauze.

And yet you jumped back in the water...

The following year I swam in the same pool (laughs). Water is my life.

You sound like that’s the reason you're determined to do all you can to save wildlife.

I want to involve the next generation in the work so that they understand that this has to be dealt with. I'm currently working on my own website with which we can get involved in marine conservation projects that children can actively contribute to.

Could the damage be reversed then?

Maybe, but only if everything worked as it should. But that's very difficult. Climate change is warming the waters, changing the currents, putting more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which is being absorbed by the sea, and acidifying the water, making it much harder for calcified organisms to build their bodies. On top of that, overfishing, dynamite, litter, and water from the land carrying too many nutrients into the sea causes algal blooms, which drown everything else in the area. But that doesn't mean we are completely helpless. My children really enjoyed taking part in coral restoration on the tiny island of Velaa in the Maldives, where the largest such program in the country is taking place. It's true that they can't see as much as I did thirty years ago, but their generation still has a chance to improve the situation.

Throughout history, politics has influenced the development of women's and men's fashion. This was also the case in 19th century Hungary, where as early as 1830, at V. Ferdinand's coronation celebrations, the members of the aristocracy wore the ‘díszmagyar’, i.e. the national ceremonial attires.

From this date is reckoned the spread of the Hungarian ceremonial attire. This was the way the Hungarian nobility showed their separation from the Austrian court during the years of passive resistance.

On Ferenc Deák's advice, they cultivated Hungarian traditions and the mother tongue in their private lives, and wore the ‘díszmagyar’ (Hungarian ceremonial attire)  equally at family events such as weddings, private parties, and at official functions, court receptions and balls.

Apron and veil

The upper part of the women's ceremonial national dress consisted of a ‘pruszlik’, i. e. a tight, close-fitting vest with a corset in the front, and a white blouse with puff sleeves. This was matched by a large skirt with a train, usually made of expensive, heavy silk material decorated with embroidery. A typical accessory was the apron and veil, usually made of tulle or lace. Aristocrats' gowns were usually decorated with flowers and vines embroidered with gold and silver thread. Married women wore lace bonnets, to which they attached a veil with jewelled clips, which consisted of two parts, one slung over their left shoulder and the other reaching to their waist at the back. Unmarried women wore a chaplet of velvet and flowers, pearls and precious stones on their heads.

Dolmány and spur boots

The men's ‘díszmagyar’ (ceremonial national attire) consisted of a fur-trimmed outer coat, the ‘mente’, a fitted jacket, the ‘dolmány’ made of coloured velvet, trimmed with gold or silver braid, tight trousers, fine leather spur boots, a bejewelled belt, a sword and a cap with an eagle or heron feather. Famous historical figures of the period were often painted or photographed in this costume. Thus, we can still see István Széchenyi, Gyula Andrássy or Mór Jókai in their díszmagyar.

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Portrait of Géza Andrássy by Gyula Benczúr

Women in jewellery and diamonds

Prime Minister Gyula Andrássy hired an English governess, Mary Elizabeth Stevens, for his children, who was always happy to detail in her letters home what men and women wore in Hungarian villages, castles and in the higher society.

Reading her letters makes you realise how people who lived 150 years ago actually felt and dreamt as we do, and how dressing was just as important in the life of a young woman then as it is today.

Mary was very enthusiastic about telling her family about the dresses she wore to the ball at the Vigadó in Pest, and she was always amazed to describe the Hungarian attires of the members of the Andrássy family. Gyula Andrássy's mother, for example, wore a green silk dress with a white lace apron, a diamond necklace and diamond bracelet, a white lace bonnet and a white veil fastened with a diamond clip. In January 1866, Gyula Andrássy's wife Katinka presented herself to the Empress in Buda in a white moiré silk dress during an official visit of the imperial couple Franz Joseph and Elisabeth. The dress was decorated with black lace and the lace apron was black, too. On her 'pruszlik' were diamond pins, and on her head was a diamond crown with three emeralds, from one side of which fell a black veil, which reached almost to the ground at the back. Her skirt ended in a heavy four-metre-long train, which was the standard length at the time. It was not only her dress that made Katinka a success at the reception, she was also the one the Empress, who already spoke Hungarian by that time, had the longest conversation with. She asked her about her children and when she had been to Vienna.

Grandeur at the coronation

The díszmagyar also played a leading role at the coronation ceremonies in 1867, when the Hungarian aristocrats attending the coronation, and even Franz Joseph and Elisabeth herself, dressed in this ceremonial Hungarian national dress. Letters home from the English governess and newspaper reports of the time tell us what expensive garments the guests appeared in. The cavalry regiments of the royal guard were lined up between the castle and Matthias Church, and behind them was a line of distinguished citizens. The citizens of Pest were resplendent in blue and white, wearing velvet cloaks trimmed with fur on their shoulders, and feathers fluttered from fur hats in their hands. Even their saddlebags were made of blue cloth trimmed with silver. But the citizens' dress was nothing like the magnates’. Form the plume-shaped jewellery of Baron Wenckheim's hat huge emeralds were dangling, while both the horse's saddle and saddle-cloth of Prince Esterházy’s horse were full of precious stones.

Of course, Franz Joseph and Queen Elizabeth were not far behind.

Sisi was already given a ‘díszmagyar’ at the time of her wedding, which she loved very much, wore often both at official Hungarian events and at functions in Vienna, and in January 1866 she received the Hungarian delegation in a new Hungarian ceremonial dress.

However, for the coronation, she had to wear an outfit she had never worn before, so she had a skirt which had lilac flowers embroidered in it with silver thread, an apron and a veil, all three sewn in Brussels. In her book Queen Elizabeth and the Hungarians - Friendship or Love?, Barbara Káli-Rozmis says that Elizabeth did not want to burden the court treasury, so the dress was not too expensive for the occasion, costing around 5,000 francs. But when she learned that her attendants, the twelve Hungarian ladies of the palace, were going to wear sumptuous toilets, several of them with silver threads, while Mrs. György Majláth, the wife of the country judge, was to wear a gown embroidered with gold threads, she had to consider how she could dress herself up, since it would not have been proper for her to appear in a less expensive and less splendid gown than her ladies. So she took the diamonds from her jewels and sewed them on her dress, in the centre of the lilac flowers. The end result was a dress sparkling with thousands of diamonds.

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Ida Ferenczy on the occasion of the Millennium

We can also see at the ceremonial dresses

We can admire Queen Elizabeth's coronation gown thanks to the dress designer Mónika Czédly, who created the most original and most accurate copy of the costume for the anniversary of the coronation, the 8th of June 2017. It is decorated with real hand-made lace, which lace-maker Túrós Istvánné worked on for eight hours a day for a whole year.

More than 4,000 Swarovski crystals have been used to replace the brilliants in the reconstruction, with real pearls sparkling on the top part.

The dress has been exhibited in several cities abroad and in our country. The next exhibition will be in Szombathely, where you can see the works of Mónika Czédly, including a copy of Queen Elisabeth's first díszmagyar from 1854, and another Hungarian ceremonial attire based on a painting by Sándor Wagner, the upper part of which is identical to the upper part of the coronation dress. The exhibition Sisi - Queen in Black and White is open from 24 March to 28 August at the Savaria Museum. And in Austria, a major exhibition on Queen Elizabeth will open at Halbturn Castle on 8 April, featuring more than 20 of the dress designer's dress reconstructions, including all the díszmagyar dresses. In addition, the Hungarian ceremonial dress of Ida Ferenczy, Sisi's lady-in-waiting, which was redesigned in 1896 for the Millennium celebrations, will be on display too and was reconstructed by Mónika Czédly.

The aforementioned Mrs György Majláth, née Stefania Prandau-Hilleprand, whose golden thread-embroidered dress she wore at her coronation can be admired in the original at the Ars et Virtus exhibition in the Hungarian National Museum in Budapest. This 19th-century gown is one of the most spectacular artefacts in the exhibition, which runs until 15 March. For those who cannot visit the program in person, you can view the dress virtually from home here.

Literature:
Fábri Anna: Hétköznapi élet Széchenyi István korában
Káli-Rozmis Barbara: Erzsébet királyné és a magyarok – Barátság vagy szerelem?
Podhorányi Zsolt: Dámák a kastélyban
Stevens, Mary Elizabeth: Levelek az Andrássy-házból (1864-1869) – Egy angol nevelőnő levelei
Wéber Anikó: Az ellenállók vezére

We talk to János Árpád János Potápi, Secretary of State for National Policy, in Kakasd, Bonyhád, and Mecseknádasd - he takes me on a tour of his favourite local landscapes with a real local patriot bias. This area is a good example of the subjective concept of ‘nation’ mentioned above: during the reign of Maria Theresa, German-speaking settlers arrived here, during the traumas of the 20th century, Szekler families from Bukovina found a home here, and then Hungarians from the Highlands arrived. Kakasd's famous village hall, designed by Imre Makovecz, reflects this community: one of its towers is in the tradition of old Swabian architecture, while the other is modelled on the wooden churches of Transylvania. The five Szekler gates in front of it symbolize the five Szekler villages of Bukovina, from which the ancestors of the Szekler community living here today fled: Istensegíts, Fogadjisten, Hadikfalva, Andrásfalva, and Józseffalva, who first came to Bácska and then, in April 1945, to South Transdanubia, including Kakasd. "Perhaps our grandparents had confidence in the Tolna region because this hilly and varied landscape reminded them of Bukovina, the landscapes of their homeland," says Árpád János Potápi, himself a Szekler from Bukovina. So the State Secretary responsible for the national policy comes from a multi-ethnic and complex community.

This visceral knowledge is indeed needed for this work because as complex as the situation of the ethnic groups in this one district is, it is just as complex in the whole Carpathian Basin.

What do nationalities have in common? - I ask the Secretary of State. "The ordeals of the twentieth century have affected the whole of Europe, and the two world wars and the subsequent peace treaties have redrawn the map, especially in Central Europe. It was the time when the saying "Enjoy the war, because the peace will be much worse" was widespread. Think of Trianon, that is indeed what Hungarians, too experienced. The punishments, perceived as unjustly severe, also destroyed the mental health of the people living here, and affected families and ethnic communities. I live and work in a district where, until 1945, there was a predominantly German-speaking population. They were deported in large numbers and then replaced by other ethnic groups who were also driven from their homes. To our area, mainly Szeklers from Bukovina and a small number from Transylvania came, and today there are about fifteen thousand of them. Then came the Hungarians from the Highlands (“Felvidék”), Slovakia, who had the only sin of being born Hungarian. The Czechoslovakian martyr-politician János Esterházy asked the Czech criminal judge during the show trial against him what his real crime was - and the judge's honest answer will ring in all our ears: that you are Hungarian.

This policy was bad for everyone: those who had to leave, those who stayed, and those who were separated. Nationality ratios were broken. This is what I grew up with. It was decisive the way my grandparents told stories about what it was like in Bukovina, how they lived, what would have happened if... All families can tell of a similar fate, whether they were Szekler or Swabian. This trauma affects all of our families. It would be nonsense to pretend that we should not do something with it, that we should not heal this trauma. In fact, this is what today's Hungarian National Policy is all about: healing from the trauma, strengthening Hungarian identity and Hungarian self-esteem, primarily in the Carpathian Basin, but also everywhere where Hungarian communities live."

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Árpád János Potápi - Photo: Tamás Páczai

The Secretary of State does not fear primarily for the countless programs, investments, and subsidies that Hungarian communities abroad have received in the past decade, nor does he fear for the abolition of strategically important institutions such as dual citizenship - or not primarily of this. What is really important, and what we must not destroy, is the sense of belonging that has been the result of all these nation-building and nation-strengthening measures among the Hungarian communities living apart.

Today, after a whole century, Hungary is once again thinking in terms of the Carpathian Basin area, moving beyond the fact that the borders of the state are inalterably not in favour of the Hungarian people, and looking for areas where there is some degree of leeway.

The territory of a country can be fragmented, but a nation is connected mentally, culturally, linguistically and historically. These ties may have become loosened over a hundred years, but once you look for them in an organised way, you’ll find that they are strong, tight and resilient.

János Árpád Potápi does not consider the estimate of fifteen million Hungarians living in the world to be unrealistic. In the Carpathian Basin, there are still two and a half million Hungarians living outside the borders and the same number in the diaspora. Some of them no longer speak Hungarian, but they know their roots, keep track of their family ancestors, and still cook Hungarian food at home on holidays - in short, they have family and cultural ties to the Hungarian nation. "It is good that we have given these people the opportunity of dual citizenship, thus strengthening the ties between them and Hungary." In total, more than a million Hungarians living beyond our borders have been granted citizenship in recent years, some of whom also regularly exercise their right to vote. Most of them have taken it up on an emotional basis, not for perceived economic benefits or social support.

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Árpád János Potápi and Kata Molnár-Bánffy - Photo: Tamás Páczai

The State Secretariat's staff studied the national policies of many countries before developing ours. They looked for good examples that could be adapted. Today, we have reached the point where others are taking examples from Hungarian programs. The twentieth century has not only ravaged our nation; everyone has a job to do, to a greater or lesser extent. "Perhaps the strongest national policy program is that of the Jewish people, whatever difficulties they have faced, we see that they have stuck together and looked out for each other, they have pulled together. After two thousand years, they were able to create a country, a modern state-building nation, it's almost unbelievable. But it works well for the Irish. There are four million Irish people in Ireland and another seventy million everywhere else. The number of higher-generation Irish people, scattered around the world, is so numerous that in the USA, for example, they are a power to reckon with in the presidential election. It is also worth looking at the national politics of Armenians and Russians."

Strengthening national identity in minorities can be a life-saver, says János Árpád Potápi. He cites as a good example the Hungarians of Vojvodina, who 25-30 years ago were the hardest hit.

"The war, the post-war conditions, bombed factories, devastation, hit them hard too. They had to recover from that situation, economically, morally, and politically. The Hungarians handled this crisis better because of their solidarity and national identity. Now the Hungarians of Transcarpathia (Ukraine) are in a similarly difficult situation. They are victims of a great power political game that is not about them. Although Transcarpathia was indeed part of the Hungarian state for 1100 years, Hungarian history began here, and it is not even a separate historical region, having been named less than a hundred years ago, the physical existence of the 150 thousand Hungarians living here is now at risk. On the other hand, where there are no problems, where there is prosperity, and where there is peaceful coexistence with the majority nation of the country, assimilation is often faster. For example, in the area around the Mura River (present-day Slovenia), where we realized too late that bilingual schools are not a good solution, they accelerate assimilation."

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Árpád János Potápi - Photo: Tamás Páczai

We are talking in the first days of December, and we cannot help but recall the shocking day, 17 years ago, on 5 December, the day of the referendum on dual citizenship. Hungarians living beyond our borders had good reason to feel denied by some voters and by the government campaigning against dual citizenship. Secondary shame has haunted us ever since. But, the State Secretary adds, it may have been precisely what we needed to start thinking very strongly about our national policy. "We got a kick in the head. Is that really what we want? That's when we decided to radically oppose this idea. If we get the chance - and we did! - we will make a national policy that will remedy both this recent trauma and the deep-rooted, century-old wounds. So that Hungarians beyond our borders can feel that, despite all this, we are one nation. I believe that we have succeeded. I am particularly proud of the Unlimited program because it is one of the guarantees of a long-term solution. Almost every seventh-grade child in the program will spend 4-5 days in one of the Hungarian regions beyond the border."

"They see and hear that there are Hungarians living in distant regions, they make friends and keep in touch with them - we hope that these children will grow up to be adults who will no longer call the Szeklers Romanian or think of  the Hungarians of the Highlands as Slovaks."

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Árpád János Potápi and Kata Molnár-Bánffy - Photo: Tamás Páczai

The first of December, which Romanians celebrate as the birthday of modern Romania, is not a day we like to remember. But there is one thing that Árpád Potápi does mention in connection with this day: our own cowering. It is a well-known fact from history books that the Hungarian railway company MÁV carried the participants to this particular Romanian National Assembly in Gyulafehérvár free of charge with the permission of Hungarian Prime Minister Mihály Károlyi. "We are the most permissive and accepting people. A self-respecting state does not support those who want to break away!"

Instead, we remember Mihály Vörösmarty, whose birthday is on the first of December. He was the private teacher of the Perczel family in Bonyhád, his muse Etelka was also a Perczel girl, and we visit the family graves and the statue of the poet in Bonyhád. “Let fortune bless or fortune curse” (a line from the national Appeal, written by Mihály Vörösmarty, translated by Wattson Kirkconnel) is a self-fulfilling prophecy hovering over our sense of history. Although the tasks are always new and every generation has its own struggles, the last ten years have been a time of blessing in national politics. 

Képmás magazine has launched a new series called Public Treasure, in which Kata Molnár-Bánffy, the publisher of Képmás, talked to dedicated people whose successful work can be of interest to many, and is a Public Treasure, as the title of the series suggests: a common issue, something we want to take care of.

Where do you feel at home? In Congo or in Hungary?

My real home is in Hungary, and I miss it very much when I'm in Congo. But when I'm back home, after two or three weeks, I yearn for Africa. Part of what I fought for, for 27 years, has taken shape. While I am away, my friends there do the work, I miss them. On the other hand, many patients come to the clinic because of me, and they wait patiently for me. I come home twice a year for 4-6 weeks, I used to come only once a year.

Normally in missions, you have three months off every three years, but as an ophthalmologist that's not good, because science advances a lot in the meantime, and it's more useful to be informed more often about what's new.

When did you first visit Africa? Did you feel you had a job to do there right after your first visit?

In 1973. I was 15 when I moved to Algeria with my siblings and parents, my father had worked there as an engineer for five years. Algeria really captured us. Back home, I went to medical school and became a specialist, but I always had the desire to go back to Africa. You have to know that North Africa is very different from Sub-Saharan Africa. Meanwhile, in 1992, I joined the Catholic Community of the Beatitudes, which had a hospital in Congo and where they were very much looking for a specialist.

After graduating from medical school you arrived in Congo with a suitcase of instruments.

I had no idea what the conditions would be like there, Kabinda is a small town in the middle of the Congo, far from any big city. I took small surgical hand tools: forceps, scissors, etc. There was only one slit lamp and one ophthalmoscope. We started from scratch. I went from the city hospital in Tatabánya, from a well-equipped ward. It was a big step back in that respect, it was difficult to start again there.

I had binoculars, I converted them into a microscope, I operated with it, and I started asking and praying.

How do the medical profession and church ministry fit together?

I am a consecrated member of the lay branch of the Catholic Community of the Beatitudes. This means I don't have to live strictly in a monastery, I can be alone. I have a special mission. Almost all monastic communities in Africa undertake social work: education, or healing. The form a hundred years ago was that the missionaries came, set up the parish, started building the church, and put up a school. That's not the case now, but every diocese has a health office, and hospitals and health centers come under it. Jesus says, 'the poor will always be with you, but I will not always be with you'. A balance must be found between the life of prayer and the medical profession. It is not good if the ophthalmological profession takes up all my time.

You perform cataract surgery for the most part. Why do so many people in the Congo suffer from cataracts, which cause blindness?

On the one hand, there is strong solar radiation and UV radiation. The other reason is that there is no primary care, and the eye care is very poor. For a country of 100 million people, there are 105 ophthalmologists, that is one doctor for every million people, most of whom work in the big cities. In Europe, 8-9 thousand cataract operations per million people are carried out every year; in the Congo, 10,000 were carried out last year for every 100 million. The difference is noticeable. In children, it is often a genetic problem, with a much higher proportion of children living with cataracts in Congo than in Europe. When I worked in Tatabánya, I did not see a child with a cataract in five years. In Africa, I operate on seventy to eighty children a year.

A cataract operation is quite quick, it takes about ten minutes. We operate on two thousand people a year, 1400 of them have cataracts.

 We are talking on 16 June, today is World Day for African Children. What chance do they have to see well?

It depends on the family, too whether the child's eyes will be amblyopic or completely healed. The child should go back for a check-up and wear glasses. If we operate on someone in a remote mission, the chances are lower that they will see well because we operate on them, but then we have to go home, and they would need regular care. After the operation, of course, they can see somewhat, but not well. They know the place where they live, and they can orientate themselves.

You started missionary work in Kabinda, but no longer live there.

I lived for ten years in Kabinda, a small town of 100,000 with relatively few patients. When peace came after the wars, more and more people came to me from other places, and I thought we should go too. Mbuji-Mayi, the capital of a diamond-producing region, a city of two million people is 150 kilometers from Kabinda. We first opened a small ophthalmology center there in 2006, and in 2017 we started building a new clinic.

You also travel to places far from your home in Mbuji-Mayi to heal. How should we imagine such a trip?

It's a big country, we're trying to cover three counties with 8-10 million people. We've seen patients come from very far away, but it's too difficult to get to us, or they're afraid of the city, they don't have the money. So we need mobile equipment, financial cover and a car. A big mission takes about three weeks.

On the last mission, we traveled for two days, stopping overnight, and the distance was only 250 kilometers. The roads are terribly bad.

But it also depends on what season you are traveling in. In the dry season, it may be easier to travel, but there is a lot of sand, which slows you down. To the most remote places, like Lodja, it takes three days. In the first years, I did everything, seeing patients and operating, but now I have six doctors, so I only operate using a modern instrumental method, which my colleagues are now starting to learn. On the missions, the crew needs two or three doctors, a head nurse in the operating theatre, a nursing assistant, an optician, and drivers. Because of long journeys, I now sometimes send them ahead and try to join them later by plane.

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Photo: András Hajdú D.

On your missions, you were sometimes asked by locals to fix a fridge or some other electric device.

For an operation, everything has to work: electrical wiring, generator, and so on. We usually go to a public hospital, where there is an operating theatre, but it is poorly equipped. I always go with two boxes of tools and I fix everything, it's in me somehow, it's how I was born. The locals then start bringing me other things to fix.

With the support of the Hungary Helps program, a new hospital was opened last year. How many years of work are there in this?

The clinic has been under construction for several years in Mbuji-Mayi, and the operating theatre was inaugurated in October. We first established the ophthalmology center in November 2006, and from there I started to gather the staff to build the clinic. We bought the land in 2013, after which construction could begin. For five years, the clinic has been owned by a non-profit organization, the director is an African doctor and my job is to provide the best specialist training possible. This is the program for the coming years.

How do you spend a working day? Do you ever not work?

For me, relaxation is when we travel, otherwise, I work from Monday to Saturday. I start the day with prayer at home at 6:30 in the morning, I'm at the clinic at 7:30, we talk about the day, and then the office hours with seeing patients or surgery start. I do most of the surgeries, and thanks to Hungary Helps we have managed to get very good diagnostic equipment, such as ultrasound, OCT (optical coherence tomography, an important diagnostic tool in modern ophthalmology - ed.), and lasers. There is no social security in the Congo, so everyone has to pay something for their care.

In the missions, sometimes someone is so poor that they can't pay anything. We have a fund from donations from Hungary, Belgium, and France, so in these cases, we help out from that fund.

It would be a disaster if someone came in blind because of cataracts and we didn't operate them because they couldn’t pay.

How do you see Sub-Saharan Africa and the Congo changing compared to when you first arrived as a doctor in 1995?

There has been an improvement, but unfortunately, specialist care has not changed. That is why I would like to train specialists, but it will take time. In Congo, there are only two big cities where you can get a specialist ophthalmology qualification. I work with general practitioners, teaching them ophthalmology. It is very important to train more specialists.

You regularly post about your experiences on your foundation's website and social media pages.

What we experience, I think, is both privileged and special. I walk in the jungle, I see the simplicity, the poverty, and yet the happiness of the children growing up. We do so little, yet what a difference we can make! The other day, I was taking pictures on the riverbank in Lusambo, when a little boy said to me: 'Hi, Doctor Rishar, do you remember me? You operated on me!" - he said. Then he took me to his dad, who was welcoming me to his house. African people are not easy to make friends with as white people. But in all this time, I've already made true friends.

Have you never thought about choosing the easier way and coming home?

I have lived through two wars in Africa, the first one in 1996 was psychologically harder, but at least they didn't shoot. Then came the second Congo war in 1998, which lasted five years. (The second conflict killed more than five million people, involving 12 African countries from Libya to Sudan to Namibia - ed.) There was a trench system around our town, it was mined and the rebels were stopped there. Anything could have happened.

I was the leader of the Catholic community at the time, we hold on to prayer very much. Missionaries are always committed to trying to work through conflicts locally.

We decided to stay. We stayed, and thank God we were not harmed in any way.

How do you imagine your daily life in 10-20 years? Have you made a lifelong commitment to healing the Congolese people?

I would like to see the clinic running well, with a secure financial and professional basis. Now I still have something to give: it is important to pass on surgical knowledge and practice that others can rely on. But what the good Lord has in mind for me in the long term, I don't know.

András D. Hajdú made a documentary about Dr. Richárd Hardi’s missionary work in the Congo, titled Szemtestvér ("Brother Eye"), which can be viewed here (in Hungarian).

Do you feel like you are not finding your way, that this is not how you want to live? That you could do more and better?  I'm an expert on self-flagellation. An expert on feeling 'I'm not good enough, a feeling that will ruin your whole day. 'I had dreams. I dreamt that my daughter would be perfect' I started my life with my mother's expectations like that. And, of course, it's not hard to guess: I have not been perfect. Especially not in my mother's eyes. We were like fire and water. She expected something else from me and I expected something else from her. It was rare that we ever reached each other's hearts. She was a successful photojournalist. She was born in a small village in Transylvania and managed to end up working for the MTI (a Hungarian news agency). Seemingly, she had everything. However, she could not be happy or at least content. She was 'wounded' as a little girl and she could not get over those wounds. She became an addict.

We lived in the first district of Budapest, in a one-and-half-room flat of a condominium where the window faced the crumbling walls of the house on the other side of the street. I felt like little Maugli in the concrete jungle, like fish out of water, choking. I was always yearning for the summertime. Looking back, I was only truly happy during the summers; we spent them either with the relatives of my mother in Transylvania or with the parents of my father in Tiszacsege, on the Great Plain. I fell in love with horses in Transylvania. I was running up and down barefoot around them in the barn, I hugged and petted them passionately. On one occasion, my mother ran out of the house shouting 'Oh, my God, my brother's just told me you were playing behind a kicker. Get out of there,  Krisztike, you might get hurt.'

But I felt no fear when I was with horses. We understood each other; their big, warm, clever, and wondering eyes brought peace to my upset and unappreciated little soul.

Driven by my love towards horses, I planned to become a vet but then I felt like I wasn't clever enough for that. And no one encouraged me. My mother took me to the career advisors and so I started my studies in Tata, in a horse breeding trade school but the education there was quite disappointing.

My father didn't mind, he always let me make my own decisions; he trusted me. He didn't mind what I wanted to do, he just wanted me to like what I was doing. He didn't expect me to be extraordinary. He was happy as long as I didn't fail my studies. He taught me completely different things. I was about 5 or 6 when he took a simple white piece of paper and drew random lines on it and then we coloured these polygons. There was no point in doing this other than spending quality, loving time together. He taught me the joy of being together, and also some DIY stuff. He's the one who taught me how to chop firewood, make fire, how to find my way around the toolshed - actually, I built the chicken coop in the garden with my own two hands. He was my hero. If it wasn't for him, I wouldn't be here today.

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The young Kira Krisztina Ványa with her parents - Photo: Kira Krisztina Ványa

In 1983 when I was 18, I asked a psychologist for help after struggling with the eating disorder bulimia for  2 years. I didn't know I had a condition but I did feel that I bottled up a lot of feelings. I felt anxious from sunrise to dawn.

I realized that I had to do something when on a stuffy summer day I came across the July edition of the Családi Lap ("Family Journal"). In an article, Gabriella Kerényi psychologist precisely described what was happening to me, from wolfing down food to self-flagellation. That's when I realized I was in trouble and that I had to do something if I wanted to survive.

That was a dark and rock-bottom period in my life. First, binge eating then throwing up. Not because I wanted to do all this consciously but because I felt the urge to do so. It was like someone else was making my decisions instead of me about what, when, and how much to eat. Then it just becomes too much and you feel the compulsion to get rid of it. And then the feeling of extreme guilt along with self-flagellation. And it just goes on and on day in, day out. It has nothing to do with physical hunger or will, for that matter; this is a psychological problem. I was escaping from loneliness and lack of love. It was escaping because my thoughts were occupied with hurting myself: 'You put on weight again, you ...', 'I can't believe you just cannot stop' - and not with, why my mother doesn't love me. She must have loved me in her own way, she did say it too, however, I couldn't feel it. I missed her presence. And it hurt to see how she was suffering and killing herself slowly.

I remember one day we were standing in front of red traffic lights when she started fidgeting with my hair and stroking it... That's the first and last time when I felt her tenderness. That moment is still within me. Ever since then I've loved it when my hair is touched.

I started my healing journey with group therapy, and through it, I learned how to stand up for myself, how to say no, and how to believe that my opinion matters. I received the greatest teachings from the group leader, psychologist Gabriella Kerényi. The then naive, suppressed girl listened to her words with jaws dropped. Those words highlighted the life that - at that time - I felt useless and unworthy. The withdrawn, quiet, and the depressed little girl became an experienced, wise, confident person. I was crying happy tears when, at 20, one night I went to bed thinking: 'Wow, I haven't thrown up today.' It took an enormous effort to climb out of that seemingly bottomless hole, and today I respect myself for that strength. Self-respect is power, peace, and strength. It's a source within you that helps you live your life in this world believing you can cope, you are worthy and it's a good thing that you exist. It was going through hell for the adolescent girl who had stolen and collected her mother's sleeping pills thinking it might be better for her to leave this world.

I had a classmate in secondary school who now makes face reconstructions of skulls of our ancestors from the time Hungarians came to the Carpathian Basin. She gave me the most important book of my life, titled Emese álma ("Emese's Dream"); it was full of findings of archeological research, studies, and illustrations of grave goods. I was looking at the pictures in that book for hours studying what a strap end might have looked like or what kind of metal ornaments (mountings) were worn depending on the status of the ancestor. I started making kaftans (long coat-like upper garments, the traditional wear of the peoples of the east) based on grave goods from many centuries ago, and I imagined what it might have been like when the members of the tribe gathered around the fire, talking, eating, drinking and singing.

As a lonely child as I was, I felt an irresistible desire to belong to a community like that, I wanted that sense of life. All this has always intertwined with the knowledge of how they respected the Earth, and how close they were to and lived with nature.

During the summers in Transylvania and the Great Plane, a picture of the future emerged in me. I was still a young girl when I imagined myself looking after a garden of many hectares with fruit trees and wildflowers; letting the horse, the goat, and the dog roam free there. Where I'm woken by the crowing of the rooster and I harvest earth scented tomatoes; where there is no place for machines or harmful chemicals.

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Photo: Dóra Vavrik

Australia brought me closer to this imaginary picture. At that time of my life (I was 40 then), I couldn't find people with the same mindset. I was regarded as an eccentric single mother, an oddball. When it was only me who put on a kaftan when it was only me who refused to use a lawn mower, I was regarded as a negligent and undemanding person; and now I'm a member of a tradition keeper community with close bonds; it is always a celebration for me when we gather across borders from here and beyond.

When I left 15 years ago, I thought the Australian aboriginal people must still live a life close to nature, and they would understand and accept me. However, people of European origin and aboriginal people are two completely different categories. The former taught me how to smile at complete strangers in the street, how to see the good in another person, and how to support them in any possible way. Aboriginal people taught me how to live with nature, and how to support it instead of controlling it.

Although I've always made my living from teaching and translating English, I feel that my life's mission is protecting nature and keeping our traditions. I realized that if someone does not know their ancestors, they are like rootless trees; they will dry out sooner or later. And even if I could not understand,

I wanted to know my past, my mother's pain, my father's persistence, I wanted to know the woman with the mixed blood of Transylvania and the river Tisza. Who am I if I don't subdue my inner voice if I don't want to comply if I am not afraid?

How would I live if I had only this one life if I only had to answer to myself? The picture got clearer and clearer. I drifted further and further from my old self.

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Photo: Dóra Vavrik

More and more consciously, I involved the thought of loving nature in my teachings. The mother of one of my students told me on the phone that they started to take their own shopping bags with them 'because of me' so that they don't need to get single-use ones in the store. It's a small thing but it gave me a sense of achievement. Almost everyone tells me how they love nature. But for me, taking a walk in the wood sometimes does not mean loving it. Love is when you actively do something for that thing. Anything you can: instead of lawn you can grow edible plants or flowers for bees and other pollinators. A huge number of people could do this. A lot of them ask the question: 'How could I find time to do gardening?' But having simple grass instead of a lawn would not take up more of their time. And if you use permaculture gardening methods, you don't even need to hoe; we don't turn the soil and we hardly move it anyway. Learning permaculture was a milestone on my journey; I got a certificate in Australia. It's a sustainable way of living where we help nature. One of its slogans is 'work with nature, not against it.'  One of the often-mentioned examples is slugs. As Bill Mollison, one of the founding fathers of permaculture said: 'You don't have a slug problem, you have a duck deficiency.' I'm just about to start using this growing method, that can potentially save our future, in a 3.5-hectare orchard, on a bigger scale.

Getting closer to 50, in Australia, I started to know who I really am. I acknowledged all that I was interested in. What other thought of me didn't bother me anymore.

I got so liberated in Brisbane, the 3rd biggest city in Australia, that I started studying naturopathic nutrition, remedial massage, and permaculture. I was incredibly motivated, I experienced an unbelievable thirst for knowledge. I spent the most ambitious 10 years of my life in Australia, I even became a citizen. But I always knew it was a state of transition. My home called my heart, and also the picture of my future that I imagined being fulfilled at home, close to my daughter and my father.

My aim was to reach closeness with nature and to avoid over-civilized existence. Now, that I'm 57, I live close to the way I've always wished to: in a 5x5 m wooden house, with no gas or water pipe, no sewage system. I have two water tanks instead that I fill up from the garden tap (I wish there was a creek close by!) when they run out of water.  I wash myself in an old-style sizeable washbasin, just like my grandparents once used to. In summer, when there's sunshine, I heat my water using a 'solar heater' that I made from a discarded satellite dish. I do the cooking on a round brick fireplace in the garden but I also have a gas stove in the house. Here, I mostly cook meat in a pressure cooker so that I use the smallest possible amount of natural gas. Behind the hen house, in the garden, there is a composting toilet and I heat the house using firewood in a nice, intimate fireplace - and since the house is small, I don't need much firewood, I find enough by the side of roads and my friends and relatives give me some that they don't need. I'm a woman living wild, in a community, one that got to love herself, one who is almost one with nature, one that doesn't need much, one for whom swinging on her dun horse, Torda, and gallop away in the light of the setting sun is more than enough for happiness.

- The story was written by Emese Kosztin, based on the memories of Kira Krisztina Ványa, and translated from Hungarian by Kira Krisztina Ványa. -

Miklós Cseri shows the newly built Transylvanian landscape unit with sincere joy and understandable pride: when fully completed, it will represent a real change of scale in the history of the Open Air Museum, as it will consist of 140 buildings on 15 hectares, in which a total of 25,000 artifacts will await visitors. The centerpiece of the section, which will be open to visitors from May, will be the main square of a Transylvanian town: a café, an Art Nouveau newspaper editorial and printing house, a grocery store, a pharmacy, a functioning post office, with the postman’s apartment above it, and a monument to the 1848 Revolution in the center of the square. It is not by chance that we feel at home among these buildings, they may be familiar from several Transylvanian towns, i.e. Marosvásárhely/Târgu Mures, Székelyudvarhely / Odorheiu Secuiesc, Kézdivásárhely / Targu Secuiesc, Sepsiszentgyörgy / Sfântu Gheorghe, and Székelykeresztúr / Cristuru Secuiesc. Unlike the traditional village houses of the traditional open-air museums, they were not dismantled, brought here, and reassembled, but replica-like copies of them were built here.

It's not the only thing that makes me feel like, in a few hours, I have to completely reprogram in my head everything I have ever thought about the Open Air Museum. The Open Air Museum is no longer a lifelike but static monument to a traditional village way of life that is disappearing, lost in the moment. Not only does the town appear in the landscape, but it also becomes alive:

you can shop at the pharmacy, post a letter at the post office, and eat a good cake at the café.

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Photo: Tamás Páczai

The new generation of open-air museums, like the one in Szentendre, which is amongst the world's leading ones, provide information by asking questions from the visitors and not by making statements. It makes you think and guides you gently through the process, with special attention to children, who make up a significant proportion of the Open Air Museum’s visitors. The youngest children no longer have a real personal attachment to the objects exhibited in the Open Air Museum: they no longer saw tools and furniture like these at their grandparents', they have never slept under their grandmother's duvet during the school holidays, and they have only seen a masonry oven in the show bakeries. They can be reached by storytelling and experiential elements. The future main entrance to the Transylvanian region, which evokes the Romanian-Hungarian border from before the fall of communism, is intended as such. The evocation of the "border freak", the stories of literature or food smuggled in a meticulously searched car, make it clear to the visitor from the very first moment that we are talking about two parts of the country, artificially and violently separated from each other. Because in fact, it is far from self-evident that

in Szentendre, a Transylvanian landscape has been created which is now on the other side of the border.

"There is a serious professional, historical and ethnographic reason why we deal with the Transylvanian region, and of course, there is an emotional and national political too," says the Director-General. "The professional reason is that Transylvania is an independent entity in ethnographic, cultural, and historical terms, and has a special place in Hungarian history. Until 1998, we were operating on the basis of our old founding document, established in communist times: it was not possible, almost forbidden, to deal with areas beyond the border. When at last this possibility was included in the installation concept, we had to decide whether to display a region that is now on the other side of the border or to follow professional considerations when expanding the Open Air Museum. The professional canon, quite rightly, says that cultural phenomena are not bound by administrative borders. Consequently, if we find in Burgenland the same things that we have already been built in the Őrség-Göcsej region, we will not bring buildings and equipment from Burgenland. Csallóköz has the same characteristics as Kisalföld, Felvidék has the same characteristics as Palócföld, and Kárpátalja has the same characteristics as the Upper Tisza region. But

Transylvania is unlike any other because it is a separate entity, larger and more diverse than any other. To give just one example, the so-called Eastern or Samos house type is not found anywhere else in the Carpathian Basin.

Of course, the professional and lay public kept asking why we didn't also cover the other areas beyond the border, so we finally decided to transfer a typical building from the neighboring area to the existing landscape units. So that is the professional reason for the Transylvanian section.

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Mock-up of the Transylvanian unit in the office of Miklós Cseri - Photo by Tamás Páczai

But there is also an emotional, if you like, subjective reason, and it stems from the terribly stupid and devastating joke that goes, "When will the Sekler become a Romanian? When he gets off the train at the Eastern Railway Station in Budapest." There are a lot of questions and a lot of puzzlement in people's minds about this, for which a decent answer must be given. Cultural national unification is about the fact that this region, administratively and politically separated from Hungary, is part of the history of Hungarian development. It has always been and always will be, and this is something that must be taken into account. And last but not least, there is a more practical reason for the development of the Transylvanian section: to preserve the value, since Ceaușescu would never have imagined in his wildest dreams that the destruction of villages and old buildings would be on the scale of that which has occurred as a result of people working in Germany, Italy or England. The inhabitants of the Transylvanian villages go abroad to work, the money comes home, and the Hungarians immediately use it to renovate the traditional houses they inherited from their grandparents. This is understandable, but it causes great damage. In a few months, the whole image of the streets is changed. We are in the last moment to save something from this."

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Prayer book in the bedroom of the Armenian house - Photo: Tamás Páczai

From Miklós Cseri, I learn how the intention and then the concept slowly evolved through conferences and negotiations; how the dream became a plan, the plan became a government decision; how the most important objects and buildings were purchased with various funds, and how what could be saved was salvaged, and how the regional unit that has now been handed over was finally built. It was not only the political leadership that had to be convinced, but also professional public opinion, and the Romanian authorities had to be cooperated with. The Director-General explains how the concept of the Transylvanian unit finally included not only objects of Hungarian ethnographic importance but also Romanian, Saxon, Gypsy, Jewish, Armenian, isolated Hungarian, and Sekler, in other words, practically all the nationalities that make Transylvania so magical. And we also talk about the perhaps most important difference in approach, i.e. the importance of the presentation of urban life in comparison to the traditional concept of the Open Air Museum, which presents rural life.

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The parlour of the Armenian House - Photo: Tamás Páczai

By spring 2022, the Transylvanian town was built - you can see the deceptive complex of buildings from the motorway, and if you don't know that you are driving between two sides of an Open Air Museum, you wouldn't understand how they appeared on the hills of Szentendre. But the village is also ready with 5-6 houses, a church, and community buildings, for the time being only for show. Lay people like me are probably just as curious to know what the experts use as a basis for selecting buildings from all over Transylvania to represent the region. Miklós Cseri refers to the movie Amélie, the scene where the protagonist rolls grain between her fingers. Such a filter is being developed by ethnographers, from smaller units within a large region, from the westernmost region of Szilágyság to the easternmost region of Moldva, from typical Transylvanian cultural phenomena such as the bear, salt, the dish of ‘puliszka’, or dance, and music, or even the Unitarian religion itself. They filter through a complex matrix the objects and buildings suitable for collection and try to end up with an inventory where an object or building can be classified into several distinct categories and types. These draw a mosaic-like picture of completeness, as far as it can be drawn from the centuries of a community with such a rich and diverse heritage.

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Rehearsal in the hat salon - Photo by Tamás Páczai

"When will the whole Transylvanian landscape be ready?" - I ask impatiently. To my surprise, Miklós Cseri answers with a very precise date: the second phase should open on 5 July 2025. "That is a very specific date, that's when I will retire. And it would be a good way to end my thirty-something-year career," smiles the Director-General.

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Miklós Cseri - Photo: Tamás Páczai

But in the meantime, he has plans up his sleeve: one of them is to present the buildings of Hungarians living in the diaspora. He says that there is already an iconic building of Hungarians in Pennsylvania and Argentina that was destined for demolition, and they are also bringing home a small building from a Hungarian kibbutz in Israel. In fact, they will help those who stayed in Hungary to reflect on why and what paths emigrants around the world chose to remain true to their Hungarian origins. Another important project is to present the century that followed 1920. "The ethnographic canon keeps track of the traditional peasant way of life only until 1920 but has no intention to explore the way of life of the one hundred year that followed. Yet history has accelerated sufficiently to present plenty of examples from the later decades of the twentieth century, from the buildings designed by Kós Károly and others to the houses rebuilt after the Bereg floods and the red sludge disaster, based on vernacular forms. It is very exciting to understand through the built heritage the processes that led to the disappearance of the peasantry, the transformation of lifestyles, the emergence of communities commuting or settling in the city, or the construction of weekend cottages in the countryside, because the desire to have a garden was still alive in the hearts of people who moved into the city," says Miklós Cseri, going into details about his plans for the future. It will be worth returning to the Open Air Ethnographic Museum in Szentendre for a long time to come. 

Képmás magazine has launched a new series called Public Treasure, in which Kata Molnár-Bánffy, the publisher of Képmás, talked to dedicated people whose successful work can be of interest to many, and is a Public Treasure, as the title of the series suggests: a common issue, something we want to take care of.

- I've read in a previous interview that as kids you were rather naughty. When did you become so modest and reserved?
Tamás: Most sports require a certain amount of self-confidence, but it's much more important to be humble and to have respect for the sport. In that interview, you might have felt that I wanted to quit after Rio. I didn't feel that it was in my career to win another medal, let alone a gold, at the age of 34... It was a big enough thing that I was able to qualify for the Olympics in the one higher-weight class, Viktor had a very difficult time, he was unfairly judged against in the bronze medal match in Rio. Ok, Viktor was not so modest, but I taught him to be.

- By the way, how much do you hold up a mirror to each other?
Tamás: He is constantly criticizing me.
Viktor: I was going to say the exact same thing.
Viktor: This is what our sport teaches us, humility, diligence, determination... of course you need self-confidence, but it's important not to let it turn into arrogance. We were specifically asked by the sports psychologist before the Olympics to be "arrogant" on the mat, but we knew that it couldn't be taken off the mat. Of course, there are some things a younger brother overlooks from his older brother...
Tamás: Ha-ha…

Viktor: ...but we really take turns passing the ball to each other. If we don't like something, it’s not our wives who we tell that to, but each other. This works for us.

- Can we say that it stays on your mat?
Viktor: Yes, that’s right. And this is good because we can talk everything over.
Tamás: I don't really remember a single idea I had that he liked the first time, though…  All wrong, all rubbish…

– And vice versa?
Tamás: Well, if he doesn't like it, I'm not going to leave it...

– So the wrestling is on …
Tamás: Outside the mat, he's the only one who wrestles, when he comes off the mat he's always much more involved, and has a stronger opinion on everything, I tend to digress. We talk about these things a lot, we ask each other for opinions, I ask his, he … well he never asks mine.
Viktor: Ha-ha…

– Has being brothers always been an advantage in the sport and in the team?
Viktor: I think it's definitely an advantage: it's good to be able to train together during the preparation, and also during the long training camps because we are away from the family, but we are there for each other.
Tamás: We have to train a lot more than if we were competitors from a bigger country, where you have a wider range of competitors, and more training partners, where you can learn more techniques. We can compete with endurance and more training. That's why these training camps are so important.
Viktor: Even in a world competition, having a family member there adds something that no one else can, even if you have a good relationship with the coach and your teammates. It was also doping that although there were other brothers in wrestling, we wanted to do better than them and thus won the European Championship medal, the World Championship medal and finally the Olympic medal. 

 - How much was the little “Skippy” (“Szöcsi”) in the shadow of the big “Skippy”?
Tamás: When I moved from Cegléd to Budapest, he started to open up, to mature, but he was a much more mature boy than me, and the four years between us soon disappeared, because I, on the other hand, was a very late maturing type. He took over everything at home as soon as I left. Sure, they called him Little Skippy, but he was never in my shadow.

– But you did pave the path.
Tamás: Exactly.
Viktor: I just took advantage of the fact that I was able to go down this path. Sometimes people compare you to your older brother, but that's their business. I don't regret being his younger brother for a minute.
Tamás: How many times did I go the wrong way... he didn't have to try those. Or when I started sports high school, I didn't know what I was taking on, I fought against everything, even though I wanted it, I had to get there physically and mentally. And he always says that those were his best years.

– What was difficult for you?
Tamás: At home, we had basic things to comply with, school, training, and obviously I was expected not to set the house on fire, but basically our parents were easy-going, they let us be independent from a very young age.

That's why it was very difficult for me at the sports school in Budapest, where I was told every minute what to do when to train when to study, when and how much to sleep, when to eat, what to eat, I didn't have a free minute. It took me 2 years to get used to it.

It was the early phase of the sports academies of today, they experimented a little bit with us, at 8:30 PM we weren’t even allowed to talk, it was lights out. That's not the case today, by the time Viktor came up, the system had already changed a lot, they realized that children need some kind of freedom, or at least they should believe that they have freedom because it's not easy for them to leave home. Of course, this is a double-edged sword, but I must admit that I don't like it when people say that someone has been mixing with the wrong crowd, because I've been in all kinds of crowds myself, but if someone has the right attitude, the right upbringing... of course, I know that today it's a different world, we hear a lot of bad things...

– You will fear for your son…
Tamás: I went to school alone at the age of 9, and everywhere else, and as soon as I reached the door handle, I picked Viktor up from kindergarten. Today that kind of life is hard to imagine, especially in Budapest...

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Photo: László Emmer

– Viktor, how did you feel about the sporting lifestyle and freedom?
Viktor: I always looked forward to Wednesdays, to go to the training of the national team, to learn a new move, to be praised by the coach. People asked me what my plans were for the future. I could tell they wanted me, too. It was a very good feeling. In eighth grade, I wanted to continue here, but I didn't get in. The negotiations went on for three weeks, I had a teammate who was already up there and I didn't know if I could come. That was the worst. I wanted to go up so much after him, I liked the system: morning training-school-afternoon training-dorm – I liked that. Sure, it's exhausting for a teenager, but I liked the academy system, and the people there. As the years went on and people dropped out, when the company started to wear off - it was hard. By my senior year, I was the only one from my room who went to training. But then I was soon selected for the junior national team.
Tamás: Viktor was talented and really wanted to come. In seventh grade, I did not have the goals he had.
Viktor: A 13-year-old is still a child, I would be quite worried today if my daughter wanted to take the train to Budapest alone, but Tamás, I think you would be too if Marci decided to do so...
Tamás: Our parents let us do it, even though they didn't know what it meant to be a professional sportsman, that it was a vocation... and our grandparents had absolutely no idea. They asked our parents what we thought not to have chosen a trade.

- It's the father in both of you who's just spoken. It's not so common for a rising career in elite sport to include family life.

Viktor: Obviously it's not easy with small children, at least that's what I thought until I saw that it was managable. I was encouraged by Tamás' example.

He already had both of his children when we were preparing for the Olympics, and my wife and I planned to have the baby after the 2020 Olympics. But we hadn't counted on the Olympics being postponed, and we couldn't reschedule at the beginning of 2020 because my daughter was already on the way. I was there from the beginning, even at birth, it gave me a lot of energy, the kind of energy I didn't even know existed.
Tamás: And obviously you need a partner to be there because it's not easy to do it alone with one child, let alone two. During the preparation phase, we are at home very rarely, often away for weeks. At those times we don't hear news of a fire breaking out, or something exploding or collapsing. There needs to be a strong pillar at home for that so that we only have to concentrate on wrestling.

– Your wives are also athletes, European champions, and Tamás' wife also wrestled.
Viktor: And mine was in fitness. That was the point. She knew precisely what it took to be successful in elite sport. We persisted and have been together for 11 years.
Tamás:  But it was not only our wives but also the steady support of our parents that enabled us to achieve such results.

– What would you like to do in the same way as them?
Viktor: I copy them. In our house, our mother had a strong personality, and I just said to my wife the other day that I would like her to be the stricter one because I can't always be present and I don't want to be strict for this reason.
Tamás: You won't be able to change your personality, now I'm telling you, you're going to be the stricter one. Anyway, our father was strict too, he just didn't have much space besides our mother. We have the same thing. My wife is a bit like Viktor both in her personality and in being unyielding.
Viktor: So she's your dream partner, that’s what it's called.

– Tamás, can you tell us what convinced you to continue after Rio?
Tamás: Viktor, mostly, with his authoritative style. He had an even harder time than I did, but he encouraged me. I was 30 at the time, I knew I couldn't go down to 66 kilos anymore, because that was already superhuman, and I thought it was the end, it was still beautiful. I had a sense of lack, a great deal of it, but I wanted to let it go. And then he came along and said, "Let's not stop, Tokyo this, Tokyo that. I liked that after the blow he'd taken, he was still pulling me out, and I agreed to try it for another year. I was confident that he would win an Olympic medal, but I wasn’t confident in myself. Then came the competitions, and the results, and I started to believe it.

– Is it easier to be confident in the other than in yourself?
Viktor: Everyone knew that there was more to Tamás' career. When he beat the reigning world champion in the higher weight class, he started to believe it too and eventually surpassed everyone's hopes.

– Is there a quality in the other person that you really like and lack?
Tamás: Yes, there is. I'm quick to jump into everything, sometimes it'd be good to sit down and think it over. I've often made the mistake of wanting to have or do this or that... sometimes I would need to step back. I'm not as deliberate as he is.

Viktor: For me, it's definitely that I find it harder to open up to new things. If he hadn't travelled to Budapest from Cegléd and started his life anew, I would have been thinking about it at home until it became nothing. He never just talked about doing it, he went and did it.

No Hungarian has ever won an adult European Championship as a junior. He went there and did it. But it was the same with fishing, which is now our common hobby. We complement each other.

– Is wrestling a topic in the extended family?
Tamás: We never take wrestling home, and this is good so.
Viktor: Never. We wrestle from Monday to Friday, then talk about everyday life, like all families do, and it's great to have something else take the focus.

– Tamás, you said that you thought about not continuing because of the family.
Tamás: There will be fewer and fewer challenges that motivate me enough not to spend evenings at home with my family. I would like to read the bedtime story to my children. Now, having said that, we are home even less these days, because there are so many requests, it's one of those times.

– Many fear what will take the place of the rigorous schedule of elite sports. Does family help with this transition?
Tamás: Obviously, the grey weekdays will play it out, but I've been looking forward to it for a while. Of course, I will miss wrestling, but I've been looking forward to trying my hand at something else, and of course, I might end up coaching in a few years' time. Getting out of the rhythm of life, and watching a world championship from the outside, watching the world championships from the stands will definitely be strange. Viktor still has an Olympics in his career, but if I make up my mind, sooner or later he will come after me, as he usually does.

– What do you like about wrestling?
Tamás: We could say some commonplace here, but in short: that's us.
Viktor: That's exactly what I was going to say. Wrestling made us like this. I often think I wouldn’t have that determination, maybe we wouldn't be able to bounce back from a failure like that, or would not be able to get out of a negative train of thought. The most that we owe it to this sport is that it has shaped us into who we are. 

Why do you think it's important to support initiatives like the Virtuosos?

I have built my career every day since I debuted over sixty years ago and for me, it never ends. I am well aware of the uncertainties and doubts of young people who start this path and that is why, as soon as I had the opportunity to support the most talented young people by promoting artistic programs in theatres around the world and through my Operalia singing competition, I was happy to do so. Virtuosos is a program that perfectly follows my ideas to discover young classical music talents and give them various opportunities to be discovered.

It is a cliche, but true: talent is not enough, diligence and dedication are at least as important as talent. How do you see the future of this genre from a professional point of view?

I  perfectly agree.

Above all, our work requires discipline and a lot of love for what we do. And there are no holidays because a musician must have consistency in practicing, always, at any age!

But I also believe that this sacrifice is abundantly rewarded by the satisfaction and also by the great opportunity to transform the passion for music into a lifelong job: this is a privilege!

What is the first thing you think of when you hear the word Hungary?

To stay on the subject, it’s undoubtedly music, because you have had great composers and a very interesting tradition. And then I am very fond of the reborn Opera House, which I had the pleasure of inaugurating after its beautiful renovations. It is a jewel!

You conducted the orchestra at the reopening gala of the renewed Hungarian State Opera. What was it like to be there for the "rebirth", as you put it, of this old, historic building?

As I stated before, it is a wonderful feeling to enter this magnificent theater again, which I visited several times in past years during the construction phase of the renovation. I find that an excellent job has been done and the acoustics are really excellent.

In my opinion, the newly restored Hungarian State Opera can be now rated as one of the most beautiful Opera Houses in the World!

What other memories do you have of our country? As far as I know, you first visited Hungary in the early 70s.

Ever since I first performed almost fifty years ago in Budapest at the Erkel Theatre all of my memories of performing here are positive because the audiences are always so warm and enthusiastic – also intelligent, as one would expect from a country that produced Franz Liszt, Béla Bartók, Zoltán Kodály, Franz Erkel, and so many other great musicians! Throughout all these past years I had the privilege to perform in various cities in Hungary, besides various venues in Budapest I had concerts in Pécs, Szeged, and most recently in Győr. Last summer we had a charity concert for the purpose of thanking the health care workers for their heroic work during the COVID pandemic.

The whole world has known you– not only the opera-loving audience –, as a tenor, you sang baritone roles most often, and you also conduct with love. I am not asking which one is your favorite, I’m more wondering why you like this kind of variety? How do several different styles and roles interact?

Life is a journey and over time many things change, it is up to us to know how to adapt.

For example, my voice and age have suited better to baritone roles over time, but I never imagined that I would build a "second career" as a baritone after 2009, when I first sang the baritone role of the Doge in Simon Boccanegra, instead of the tenor role I had sung previously. As for conducting, that goes back a long way too: as a boy, I never thought I would be a singer and I learned to play the piano... so they are all paths that intertwine.

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Photo: Valter Berecz

Does classical music have to "keep up" with youth? Does it have to be renewed? How do you see the actual position of the opera genre from the point of view of the audience?

Opera and classical music have an intrinsic beauty that touches even the young. It is up to us and the institutions to spread this: children need to know music and know that it is not a genre intended for an elite audience.

Many pop, rock, rap songs can be „dated” and may have an expiration date, while classical music is eternal, it has a charm, and longevity that goes beyond generations.

You are the emblematic figure of La Scala, you are also legendary as a member of The Three Tenors, and you have made lasting impressions all over the world. Is there anything you miss in your career or have you achieved all that you wanted in the field, do you feel satisfied when you look back on your professional life?

I think I got a lot out of it and I hope I managed to convey my emotions to the audience. To be honest, I am satisfied, I think I did the best I could with what I had and the means at my disposal.

For the sake of the game: If you could magically sing bass, which roles would you be interested in?

Oh, there would be so many, above all I would settle on Verdi. There are Zaccaria, Fiesco, Banco, Filippo II, Attila, and I could go on.

Where do you like to sing the most? In an opera house, on an open stage, or somewhere else?

My natural habitat is definitely the theatre, but there are certainly some very special outdoor places. I've sung in ancient arenas, amphitheaters and under the Eiffel Tower, in Central Park, in stadiums, like in the Népstadion with Diana Ross and José Carreras, or in the plazas de Toros. Every place and every public creates new alchemy and the special thing is being able to tune in.

Your motto is: "If I rest, I rust". How long do you plan to continue singing?

I have no idea, it's a question I can't answer myself.

To be honest, I never thought I’d get to 81 and still be able to sing opera on stage.

I am happy and being on stage gives me great joy, because music is an indissoluble part of my life.

The Director-General points out our achievements: it is a great thing that barely ten years after the fall of the Kádár regime, of communism, we were able to face up to this legacy: we were able to show Hungarian society and the whole world what they did to us - because that is what the House of Terror Museum is all about. Even today, many people are still unable to do this. In the case of Nazism, it took much longer to come to terms with what happened. So we are actually leading the way in this, says Mária Schmidt.

"The first step in coming to terms with the communist legacy is to understand what happened - what they tried to do to us, and of their goals what they succeeded in doing, and what they failed to do. And indeed, thirty years on, things are seen in a different light. There was one question that has always concerned me and my American friends, for example, Norman Podhoretz, who spoke about it here in Budapest at our conference, and that is why Western societies did not celebrate the fact that they had defeated communism. We now understand why: because they’ve never defeated it. Communism is in fact a Western ideology that spread to the East, and we were hit by that East wind, but by the time we had defeated the East, it had taken over the West. The Western intelligentsia, who considered themselves progressives, became Marxist, their language, their values, and their most important aspirations are rooted in that. They embraced atheism, anti-family, and anti-marriage. Two important factors have underpinned this thinking since the 1970s: one is internationalism, now fashionably called globalism; the other is economic neoliberalism, the placing of utility as the overriding consideration. When we threw off Soviet rule, this money-centered world became dominant in our country too. In the Western world, there is no longer a question of good or bad, right or wrong, it is only a question of whether something is useful or not, whether it pays off or it doesn’t. This now presents us with a new challenge, and we have to overcome it. But if we realize that this is the same ideology that we have already overcome, we can go into the battle with greater hope.

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Photo: Tamás Páczai

In the 1990s, we have already seen the collapse of an empire. We know that it can be survived. We know that communism can be defeated.

Our region has not been Sovietised, we have always had the strength to resist. While the Western world was largely Americanised, we showed resistance to the Eastern version of the same ideology. Now the Western intelligentsia is left with no thought, no idea, nothing. This is the greatest contradiction that exists between us and them. I will give you an example: a friend of mine who was a member of the Central Committee once told me that János Kádár made a speech sometime in the 1970s, apparently from his head, continuously. But in the meantime, he looked down again and again at the paper he had with him. This acquaintance of mine was curious to know what was on the paper, so he took it from the lectern after the speech. Well, there were communist slogans on it, such as "Long live Soviet-Hungarian friendship" and "The Soviet example before us" - even Kádár had to make himself remember these. Even then, everyone was a Marxist or pro-Soviet only on the basis of realpolitik. We knew we had to say these things, but our thinking was not based on them. In the meantime, the Western intelligentsia had become Marxist, and they are now sitting in Brussels. Even the representatives of the right-wing parties started with the Maoists and Trotskyists, and you can't outgrow that, the world explanation, the language, and the structure remain there. So we have to make ourselves aware that we have already defeated them once. Now we can do it again."

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Photo: Tamás Páczai

We walk around the House of Terror Museum - both my grandfathers were here, in this building, one brought in by the Arrow Cross, the other by the communists - and we talk about the mourning, because the next step in the process, after understanding, is to do the mourning work. After the change of regime, the left-wing elite practically prevented us from doing historical justice. "They didn't even acknowledge that there was something to mourn and someone to mourn," says Mária Schmidt.

"We were not able to bring the communist perpetrators to justice, nor were we able to reproach them. That is why we thought it important to create the Wall of Perpetrators here in the House of Terror Museum. At least this is to show that no one can escape the punishment they deserve."

Today, the museum's staff are engaged in research and publication, and the task is to make the atrocities of totalitarian regimes known to the wider public. The Director-General misses the artworks, books, films, and plays that would do the same thing in their own more effective way. It is in vain to expect these works from the Western film industry, we must produce them and make them known at least here in Central Europe. "Why hasn't a 10-12 episodes series on communism been made yet?" - asks the historian.

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Photo: Tamás Páczai

This "mourning process" is being carried out under the auspices of the House of Terror Museum, with that in mind was the 1956 commemoration year organized on the 60th anniversary of the Revolution and Freedom Fight. Mária Schmidt feels that their efforts to make a new narrative about '56 accessible have been successful. "Even in Game of Thrones, they say you can defeat anything but a good story. Narrative defines thinking. For a long time, thinking about '56 was defined by a closed society, they cherished its heritage, and they didn't let anyone else in. That's how it could become widespread that 1956 was a revolution of reformers disillusioned with communism and left-wing intellectuals. But it's a completely unrealistic story: imagine the workers of Ganz-MÁVAG encouraging each other, saying, come on, buds, let's go out and demonstrate because there was a very interesting discussion in the Petőfi Circle about surplus value... Oh, please, come on! What the left-wing intellectuals were discussing among themselves was of no interest to more than 500 people. For that no one takes to the streets, people don't risk their lives!

’56 is about the Hungarian people saying enough is enough, they don't do it anymore, because the survival of the Hungarian nation is at stake. It was not the intelligentsia that revolted, but the people were fed up with what was being done to ordinary people, peasants, workers, to the nation. Ultimately, it was about the dignity of the nation.

90% of those executed were ordinary people. That's why we put their pictures on posters all over the country, the pictures of the boys from Pest. It’s always the simple, ordinary people who speak the most beautifully about their motivation. They don't overcomplicate it. They are not afraid to name their feelings, what was in their minds, and why they took up arms. And most of them talked about how they went out to the streets because they were humiliated. They and their nation were humiliated. And there's no need to explain that any further. An intellectual could never put it so simply and so eloquently."

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Photo: Tamás Páczai

We continue the conversation in the rooms of the House of Terror Museum. “The next step in the mourning process is to move beyond the constant self-pity. This is made more difficult by the fact that we live in an era of competition to see who is the greater victim because this is the basis for special rights. Moreover, the injustice that happened to us after Trianon or the Second World War is indigestible. And yet we have something to be proud of: we have survived, we are free and independent, and we have started to build a democratic country. Perhaps we also need to start thinking differently about Trianon. Perhaps we will even benefit from the fact that however forcibly we were made into a relatively homogeneous nation-state. The point is to do the mourning work so that we can move on. We do not have time for self-pity, we need all our strength to move on. It would also help if we did not believe that Hungary is an island.

If we climb up to the church steeple and look out over the landscape, we can see where we stand in relation to neighboring countries and other people, we can see the connections, and we can see that we have something to be happy about.

Today the entire Western world is based on the historical narrative of the victors of the Second World War. But here is the new world, the 21st century, and no one will care about this old narrative. In order to have a national consciousness we need to be able to move forward, we need to find the language and the channels through which we can tell this to the new generations. We must arouse their interest, we must tell them the story and the truth of their parents and grandparents. That's why I thought it was important for the House of Terror Museum to speak to people in the most popular - in the original and noble sense of the word -,i.e. the most understandable way possible, because only with colorful and meaningful stories can we achieve anything. You have to appeal to the senses. Pay attention to the visuals, work with few but very good texts. You need simple, memorable gestures that everyone can understand," says Mária Schmidt, explaining her thoughts on communication.

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Photo: Tamás Páczai

"We have to fight against a very strong empire-building intent, like the Soviet Union had. Then you couldn't say that Comrade Brezhnev was stupid, now you can't say that there are two genders, male and female... We have taboos like the old ones. We already know this terrible indoctrination, and we got rid of it once, but now it is upon us again, only it is coming not from the East but from the West. We need to be aware of what we are up against. For a long time, we thought that the West was opposing communism - people have not realized yet that they are the heirs.

Where do we get the ammunition for all this? From God. We have this one thing, what else is there? We must look at history from His perspective because if we look at it any other way, we lose the perspective that can give us hope."

Képmás magazine has launched a new series called Public Treasure, in which Kata Molnár-Bánffy, the publisher of Képmás, talked to dedicated people whose successful work can be of interest to many, and is a Public Treasure, as the title of the series suggests: a common issue, something we want to take care of.

We are traveling to Tarnabod with the staff of the Hungarian Charity Service of the Order of Malta so that they could show us where hard work can take you with the Emerging Villages program. For almost two decades, the Hungarian Charity Service of the Order of Malta has been working in Hungary's most deprived settlements, including Tarnabod, under the “Presence” (“Jelenlét”) program. The essence of the program is that they first establish a presence in each place, a community center, where expert staff patiently work to diagnose the local community and, based on the diagnosis, continue the development work with individual solutions. The ambitious government program, based on the methodology of the Hungarian Charity Service of the Order of Malta, aims to help 300 of the poorest communities in our country to catch up... "Integration must start the other way round: we must first integrate into these communities, understand the mindset, the drives, the internal forces, i.e. the way the community works. Then we can help, then we can help well," says the Prime Minister's Commissioner in the car.

The significance of the program, led by Vecsei, who has decades of empirical experience and is committed to it, is that it is both systemic and based on individual diagnoses. Of the 300 municipalities included in the program, based on various statistical data, 118 have got an owner so far and thus have been able to start the program. In these municipalities, the staff of an NGO settles down, sets up a center, and begins to work systematically to establish the diagnosis. In addition to the Hungarian Charity Service of the Order of Malta, the Hungarian Reformed Church Aid, Caritas Hungary, the Hungarian Interchurch Aid, and the Hungarian Baptist Aid are the backbone of the program, but the Greek Catholics, the Benedictines, the Salesians, the Jesuits, and some non-church NGOs have also taken on one or two settlements.

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Miklós Vecsei - Photo: Tamás Páczai

The problems to be solved are complex, varied and sometimes almost impossible to solve. In most places, property ownership is unresolved, while at the same time there are huge mortgages on them. Utilities for basic services are often lacking, and at those places where there are utilities, there you have to take good care of them because the temptation to make “illegal connections” is great. There are no jobs in entire districts, there is no transport to work or school, and there are also loan sharks and traders who exploit the poorest.

Some of the people here are focused on survival, and when the survival instinct takes over, it overrides everything: human relationships, values, goals, dignity.

"This is what distinguishes destitution from poverty," says the Prime Minister's Commissioner, "especially so-called decent poverty. It's not easy to imagine the state of those families who really have neither the physical nor the mental energy to, say, dig up the yard and sow the seeds. It's particularly difficult to understand for those who have lived periods of their lives as poor and have managed decently."

What we are talking about here is the biggest problem Hungary is facing, with no sure-fire solution. There are as many people living in these three hundred settlements, as in Komárom-Esztergom County, but the number of homes without utilities is five times higher than elsewhere, the number of registered jobseekers is six times higher than elsewhere, while the number of births is almost twice the national average. If we juxtapose the map of the 300 poorest settlements with the map showing the territorial distribution of the Roma population, the overlap is clear. If we take into account the birth data, including the age of the women giving birth, and the reproductive rate, we can calculate that 8-10% of the population will be born in these villages in a twenty-year time span.

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Photo: Tamás Páczai

"The stakes are very high", adds Miklós Vecsei.

"Hungary's fate is decided here, not where we would like it to be. What happens to these children in these settlements is not only a social question, it is a serious economic question. In twenty years' time, will they be supporters or dependants, taxpayers or recipients of benefits? These are questions that affect not only them but all of us."

Despite the many collapsed houses and the many sad signs of poverty, Tarnabod has a good atmosphere and lively life. Melinda Nyírfalvi, the head of the institution, takes us through the institutions that have been set up by the Order of Malta to teach, educate and develop children, following them from conception to high school and, if possible, beyond. "We focus on the first thousand days of human life," she explains, "not only in Tarnabod, but in the whole program, because that determines everything." This means that attention is paid to early childhood care, such as a smoking-free pregnancy, and then all areas of infant and early childhood development are given every opportunity for healthy physical, mental and emotional development, from exercise to neurofeedback. I was particularly impressed by the fact that all the institutions offer movement improvement: with special equipment for the little ones and during sports and ballroom dancing classes for the bigger ones. We learned that Roma mothers, who are often very young, are reluctant to let their babies out of their hands. The reason for this is not because they are overprotecting, but is more to do with the circumstances: in many houses, there is nowhere to put the child down (there is no bed and the floor is unsuitable). However, a child held in hands does not learn to crawl in time, which is a major disadvantage later on. In the ”Secure Start Children's Homes” (“Biztos Kezdet Gyermekházak”) in Tarnabod, mothers are also taught what to practice with their children. Other offers for mothers, such as manicures and haircuts, are designed to encourage them to come to the center with their children.

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Photo: Tamás Páczai

"The “Presence” program is based on the hope that after five or six years we will be able to find local people to work with us. We already have many support workers who have grown out of these programs themselves. The girls are attracted to childcare-related activities because they had good experiences there as children. Little by little, the number of people employed in the institutions is increasing in each municipality. Those who grow up here are received with less suspicion by the locals, and also have a better understanding of the community patterns and of the hidden or strange systems of relationships. They can often be more effective here, for example in the schooling of a child or persuading parents. They are the guarantees of the long-term viability of the program. We will be out of Tarnabod for years, and Maca will still be here," explains Miklós Vecsei.

Children whose early development has been taken care of and who have received careful nursery, school, and after-school education are more likely to become active, self-sufficient, and, not least, satisfied, self-respecting members of society.

To achieve this, it is important for them to see good examples. Children born into the poorest communities grow up in closed communities. If they do not have a vision, it is because they do not see good role models, working adults with useful vocations. This is why the importance of committed and courageous businesses getting involved in one of these communities is so important. Tarnabod has an electronic waste processing plant, but the entrepreneur who runs it, Attila Bencsik, has already brought a biotechnology lab here and is working on new opportunities. And in the school, Maca Bangó says that when the model houses for social rental housing were built under the Emerging Villages Program - which are now becoming eligible for local families - the children immediately started saying they wanted to be architects or bricklayers or electricians. A person who works for the Order of Malta, like Maca, who not only learnt a trade on her own, but then graduated at an evening-high school program and now attends two different universities, is also a good role model for the children. She is also one of the Family Housing Subsidy Scheme (“CSOK”) advisors in the area, helping many young families to get their own home. Maca has also found a partner among the musicians who have come to them under the Symphony program. This music program minimises the theoretical curriculum, gives the children a sense of achievement and joy in making music together, and for the most talented, a chance to move on and develop.

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Photo: Tamás Páczai

The dedication with which the programme's staff introduce us to the ins and outs of their work, the joys and the amazing difficulties, quickly sweeps us off our feet. It's often said that helping professionals should not get emotionally involved. Here we learn about another dimension: they are not cold or distant, but they are also aware of their emotions and, above all, they help each other to manage them. The unspoken mentoring relationship between manager and colleague, between more experienced colleague and newcomer, is also very palpable. They know, love and support each other.

"I learned most things about life from my grandfather. He was originally a shoemaker, but he lived his life as a peasant. I grew up at his feet, and from him I learned the clear common sense of going close to the task, examining, measuring and acting accordingly. The way shoes are made. We practice this in the Presence (“Jelenlét”) program. A good diagnosis is more important than anything. That we can now match this with resources, that we have government money for the tasks identified, is a state of grace. So is the opportunity to make some systemic improvements. It takes patience and a lot of time - but financial resources can shorten that time. In Tarnabod, where we have been present for 17 years, we feel that things are perhaps starting to turn around, that this municipality is well on the way to becoming self-sufficient. But it still has a long way to go."

As I am listening to the Prime Minister's Commissioner and I can almost hear the reader asking with me: what can I do to help?

My interviewee's T-shirt reads: ” What do you have that you did not receive?” "In order to help well," he says, "you first have to answer this question well. Our talents, our opportunities, and our life circumstances resulting from these were all given to us. If I've been given talents that I can produce a lot more with, whose talents are those that I've produced? Do I keep it for myself, build an empire out of it, or do I give it to those who have less? If we can sometimes marvel here on our balcony of prosperity at how much we have been given, and give thanks for it, then we will easily be able to give some from it. We need to give wisely, of course: in addition to enthusiasm and goodwill, we need a wealth of knowledge, experience, and complex skills, and even then there are still many failures. Those with a strong determination will find a link to well-established organizations that have this knowledge. That's who we work with." 

Képmás magazine is launching a new series called Public Treasure, in which Kata Molnár-Bánffy, the publisher of Képmás, talks to dedicated people whose successful work can be of interest to many, and is a Public Treasure, as the title of the series suggests: a common issue, something we want to take care of.