Did you have a childhood dream; did you think about what you would be when you grew up? 

I had no big dreams that defined my career. But music was present from childhood, as my father was a musician. I was born in Hajdúnánás and went to music school in my primary school years, but then I stopped until it found me again as an adult.  

How often did your family get together to play music and dance?   

When I was a child, we had these big name-day celebrations in our garden, which I joined in. I also played the violin at events and enjoyed it. I liked it when Daddy got ready and washed, shaved, and dressed in his Sunday best before he left. He did it in style, honouring his listeners. It's important for us too, to play music anywhere, for anyone, with total devotion.  

If we were playing just for you with the band, we would play the same way we play for a thousand people, because we want to give everyone the same experience.   

Did your father have his own folk band? 

There was a formation in which only the Erdei people worked, the extended family. I could say that they were the original Erdei Band. My father played the accordion, and there was also a double bass, saxophone, and violin in the line-up. The saxophone player sometimes played the clarinet. I don't know of any band in Nánás that had a cimbalom, it was mainly stringed instruments. It is a great pity that no recordings were made at that time, I would really be curious to hear them. A few photographs have survived, including a Polaroid picture taken by German guests. 

Do you still have that accordion? 

Yes, but you rarely hear it, and then only at home. My father played music continuously for twenty-five years, but when he was my age, he stopped. There were years when his whole calendar was full in January. Then he had an accident that broke his career in two. He was on his way to work when a car swerved into the other lane, hit him and left him. If a good-hearted man doesn't come along and call an ambulance, he'd be left in a ditch. My dad is now 83 and was being treated for lymphoma. We went to Debrecen with him and thanks to the doctors he was healed. We are grateful that they did not give up on him despite his old age.  

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László Erdei Jr. with his father, László Erdei Sr. - Photo: property of László Erdei

Where did the idea of having your own band come from? 

I used to play in the Tekergő folk band, but I reached the point where I wanted to explore and try out my own wings.  

The members of the band played in several formations, and by luck, we came together at a family event. We have been playing together for more than five years with cimbalom player Ferenc Andrássy, who comes from Salgótarján, Miklós Jankura is our violist, Bence Fodor plays the bass and I play the violin. We all have jobs in our field of activity and music is just our hobby. We get on well together, both as people and as musicians. We're a good team, we have a good laugh and we play music, and it's no longer a problem to get in tune with each other without rehearsing together.  

Do you only play in this formation? 

We also go to other gigs if one of us is invited to play in another band; the floor is open, but our own performances come first.

Do you like playing anything, or is there a particular region the melody of which is closer to your heart? 

We play anything, depending on the needs. For me, my favourite is the music from Kalotaszeg, that's the one I've learned the most. I also find the folk costumes the most beautiful, and the dance routines are good. When we have a stage show, I always sneak in something from Kalotaszeg. I usually have a plan, but my friend Misu Jankura thinks I play whatever comes to my mind anyway. Yes, sometimes we plan a dance routine from the South of the Great Plain, but then I decide to play one from the Szilágyság region and the others automatically join in. I'm careful not to change tunes as I go along, although they could keep up with me in that too, I've had an example of that in at a dance towards dawn. And we always play music by heart. We play live, sweaty music.  

Do you have childhood memories of real, traditional dance-houses? 

Unfortunately, no. My father and his friends used to sing together, play waltzes or some music just to listen to. As a child, I learned classical music at music school, which gave me a good grounding and encouraged me to play with precision and clarity. At that time there was no folk music education at music schools. I was introduced to folk music in more depth in Eger and studied it as an adult at the music school. Attila Szabó from the Csík orchestra was my teacher. I was also influenced by fellow musicians, I practiced a lot and went to folk music camps. I have been to Transylvania several times, where there are still dance-houses, but that is a new era.  

How do you see it, do young people still have a demand for folk music?  

On a national level, I see it on the right shelf, thanks to Ferenc Sebő and his friends who started the dance-house movement.

There are many folk bands and dance groups; folk song and dance "infects" many young people, who win prizes and keep the traditions alive. It has a future.  

Of course, support from municipalities is also important for it to flourish, because it is not always given enough space in rural towns. Before Covid, we had a lot of requests, but after Covid, businesses closed down, there were fewer occasions for entertainment, and the opportunities were limited. There is still a demand for us to play at village festivals, but we go to weddings less often, where live music is starting to be replaced by electronic music.  

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The Erdei Folk Band - Photo: Property of László Erdei

How can you combine music and police work? 

I can combine them just fine because the shows usually are on the weekends. Colleagues know about it and consider it a special combination, a rarity. I don't benefit from it, but it's a positive experience. It's not a usual police hobby, although the former head of the Budapest Police Headquarters also played music, I recall he played the clarinet. 

How did you end up being a policeman?

After finishing high school, I completed my compulsory military service in Siklós, and a friend suggested a career in the police. To be honest, at first, I was only attracted by the early retirement pension, which has since been abolished, but slowly I became more and more interested in the profession. I've been through almost every branch of the service, and a great part of Hungary as well. I patrolled in Budapest, and for many years I was a district officer in Debrecen, as a detective. I worked mainly on the property protection line; searches and interrogations were a daily routine, and fortunately, I didn't have to spend a lot of time on administration. Then I moved to Eger, where I worked on criminal cases and offenses, and a few months ago I became a press officer. Perhaps the only thing left out was the traffic service. 

Have you been in a dangerous situation at work? 

Fortunately, I never got into that kind of situation and never used a gun.  

There have been riskier situations in house raids, but never violence.   

Do you like challenges? 

I was drawn to them when I was young, but time has passed me by. Sport is still part of my life, cycling is one of my hobbies, but music is much more important.  

If you could start again, would you choose a different direction? 

Whenever I go to Debrecen and drive past the Academy of Music, I remember my dear teacher, Mr. Barkóczy, who encouraged me not to stop playing music. However, at that time having a profession was very important and my father encouraged me to do so, so I became a mechanical engineer and then found a career in the police. I regretted giving up music for a while, but eventually, I found my way there.  
 

I'll never forget the day when my father, who was being treated for terminal lung cancer, was transferred from the active treatment ward to hospice palliative care: a whole new world opened up for us. How would you sum up the difference? Why is hospice so different from active patient care? 

Let me recall a relevant, personal memory. In the 1990s, as a trainee doctor, I was working in Margaret Hospital when hospice as a "movement" was just starting in Hungary. But there were a couple of wards in the internal medicine department where hospice patients lay behind mauve-coloured curtains. When I went in there, I found that patients were treated in a very different way there; I do not mean this as a criticism of active medicine. These two things are not in contrast to each other. I first encountered hospice care there, and it was only much later that I was transferred from the active lung ward at Korányi Hospital to the hospice palliative ward at the same institution.

In what way is hospice different? For example, each of our patients is surrounded by a full multidisciplinary team, based on the hospice values, with a doctor, nurse, physiotherapist, psychologist and volunteer, each in their own field. They are the ones who support the patient and their relatives, as well as helping each other as colleagues. We learn about communication: how to deal with difficult situations and bad news. 

We have learnt to communicate with open questions: we don't ask the patient if their back hurts, but how they feel, giving them space to share their real feelings and experiences. 

To cope, we also seek help for ourselves - in this respect, our work is more conscious. Values shift, and other things become more important, not just for the patients, but for us too. Family, a smile, a caress, a visit from a therapy dog, or even a day when the sun shines through the window, becomes more precious. The concept of time is also very much transformed, it slows down; as one of our old patients aptly put it, it 'becomes dense'. 

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Photo: Hungarian Hospice Foundation

The original meaning of the word hospice is a refuge, a place where the traveller can rest: that's not something to be feared. Yet we still find that it is commonly associated with death in the public mind. "Oh, let's hope we don't end up there", "Well, we're not there yet", people say. We do not lose a patient because they are admitted to the Budapest Hospice House, but because their illness is progressive. And I have never heard that either palliative or hospice care has taken anything away from patients, but rather given them.

For example, easier everyday life, and the chance of a dignified end to life. But these are very highly individual things that can be influenced by many factors.

Yes, this is a very sensitive and difficult area, there are no universal truths. For the patient, quality of life can be whatever it means to them. And how relative a concept this is is illustrated very well by the so-called Calman-Gap hypothesis. This principle defines quality of life in terms of the gap between our desires, our expectations and the possibilities available to us. The closer these are, the more optimal our day-to-day life is. Reduced mobility is not an ideal situation, but it can be a joy for the patient to be able to use a wheelchair to get out to a nearby park, a terrace, or the garden of a Hospice House.

One of the aims of our work is to try to "fine-tune" our patients' expectations to their possibilities, right up to the very last moment. 

Pushing the boundaries of quality of life raises many questions, including when and who has the right to decide about death. In our country, euthanasia is not possible, and from time to time, as recently, debates flare up about whether it should be allowed. How does the hospice approach this?

Of course, we can't give our patients everything, but we can do a lot to prevent them from even considering euthanasia by providing high-quality symptomatic treatment, pain relief, and anxiety relief. The cornerstone of improving quality of life is a multidisciplinary healthcare team who do their utmost to alleviate the often complex and distressing symptoms. The aim is to bring the palliative period – which is not the end of life but a time when we try to address the patient's physical and psychological distress in a complex way that relieves pain – earlier and earlier into the active phase of treatment. Early palliative care can reduce the side effects of still-active treatment, reduce unnecessary interventions, and prolong life spent in good quality. And we can help caregivers by sharing the burden. 

Hospice is therefore fully pro-life and pro-quality of life. This is supported by research in countries where euthanasia is legal. The study involved thousands of people who had planned in advance to request euthanasia as their illness progressed. After a team of palliative care doctors was assigned to them and began working with them, a total of 16 people remained who stuck to their original decision.

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Of the thousands of people who requested euthanasia,  eventually, only 16 stuck with their decision after receiving palliative care. The poster reporting the results of the survey was presented at the conference of the European Association for Palliative Care in Budapest in 2007 - Photo: Hungarian Hospice Foundation

Euthanasia is not available in Hungary, but there are certain possibilities to refuse certain medical interventions and to make decisions about death. What are these?

First of all, it is very important to try to correct the misunderstandings surrounding the concept of euthanasia. The patient's increasing pain can only be alleviated by the correct, and appropriate increasing dose of medication, which is a medical obligation, and not indirect (or passive) euthanasia. 

It is also not passive euthanasia if a patient no longer receives a treatment that is considered unnecessary, or if patients who are terminally ill and naturally dying are not resuscitated. 

In Hungary, a person suffering from a terminal illness but with the capacity to act can also refuse treatment or certain interventions to prolong their life, following existing legal models: either in the form of a notarised written living will or through a three-member medical committee.

Rather, hospice can be involved in the issue of euthanasia by demonstrating and constantly communicating the alternatives and tools that are available to avoid the need for euthanasia.

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Photo: Dr Krisztina Tóth

What is the biggest challenge for you now? 

I work with my colleagues in social awareness and education to change the 'switch' in people's minds: to make the word hospice not anxiety but relief and reassurance. We are a long way from that, but we are making progress. This is our priority at the Foundation: we organise training courses for lay people, health professionals and doctors, we organise programmes for journalists, we visit GP surgeries. Hospice is not a one-way street: if a patient's condition allows it, we let them go home for a while, but most of them want to come back to us when their condition no longer allows them to stay at home. Experience works in our favour, but not having experience still creates fear.
 

One carriage for all

The first carriage company was the idea of the mathematician-philosopher Blaise Pascal in 1662. The service was first used by Louis XIV, the Sun King, so it's no surprise that it became popular with the nobility. The business lasted only fifteen years, and for the next century and a half mail coaches were used for long-distance passenger transport. From the 19th century onwards, the railways became the new alternative to overcome the distance, but as cities grew, the demand for shorter-distance means of transport that were accessible to the masses increased. In 1826, an entrepreneur from Nantes offered a solution by launching a carriage service between the city center and the suburban spa. The service, which became one of the cornerstones of urban public transport, became known as ‘voiture omnibus’, or carriage for all.

To the City Park for a few coins

The omnibus service in Pest started on 1 July 1832. The entrepreneur János Kratochwill had local guildmasters make covered carriages that ran between his two cafés, today's Széchenyi István Square and the City Park, covering the three-kilometre distance in about twenty to twenty-five minutes. The service opened up a new era in the life of the city, for until then most people walked, only the wealthier could afford to travel in a hired coach, a Hansom cab, or a two-horse drawn carriage. 

The omnibuses, which ran every hour and then every half hour between six in the morning and six in the evening, had no stops, they stopped wherever passengers wanted to get off.  

Other sources claim that Kratochwill's omnibus was not the first: "The late Ödön Lechner, the brilliant architect, told us that his grandfather [...] tried out the first omnibus in Pest in the late twenties", which "nobody wanted to ride. Finally, the old man got angry and one Sunday he put his wife and children on the unusual means of transport and drove out to the City Park. However, the journey was not such a good idea after all because "the folks" were surprised by the strange constitution, the children ran after Lechner's carriage and shouted all sorts of obscene things after Lechner" - reads the 1929 issue of the Magyar Hírlap ('Hungarian Newspaper') magazine.

Tickets for the eight to fourteen-seater omnibus cost between six and ten krajcár depending on the distance. Since the daily wage of a maid was twenty to thirty krajcár, it was mainly retailers, clerks, craftsmen, and intellectuals who could take advantage of the new public transport. Despite this, the omnibus, also known as the all-rounder, or the buddy-car, became so popular that a month later the first omnibus was launched on the other side of the Danube, in Buda, too, running from Tabán via Víziváros to Lipótmező. 

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Photo: Fortepan

Fashionable like the omnibus

"Twenty years ago there were hardly any omnibuses in Pest. The tenant of the Veli Bej Bath, József Szekrényessy, used to have a few large and heavy carriages built. A couple went to the Veli Bej Bath, four or five (mostly empty) to the City Park, and then a few to the developing New Pest. In the fifties, most of the population was still shy of such cheap rides. But at the end of the decade, the number of carriages increased, and the middle classes started to use them. And at the beginning of this decade, especially after Ferenc Deák and his companions used to take the omnibus to the City Park, it became quite fashionable. Since then, one can often see in them even such distinguished people who otherwise also have magnificent own carriages with coats of arms" – wrote the January 1869 issue of the Fővárosi Lapok (Capital City Newspaper).  

With the popularity of omnibuses, the crowds on the buses also increased, with the 1845 issue of the Honderű ('Country Fun') magazine saying that they look "like a cage in which poultry are crammed to bursting point". 

The carriages soon appeared in the countryside, in 1847 they were already in Sopron, and ten years later they were on the streets of Szeged, Miskolc, Debrecen, Szombathely, and Székesfehérvár, mainly transporting passengers between the city center and the railway station. 

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Photo: Fortepan

The competition: the horse-drawn railway

In 1866, omnibus traffic declined overnight: the horse-drawn railway was introduced. At first, it was used in the mines, as previously the corves were moved on wooden tracks by men. From the second half of the 18th century, wood was replaced by iron structures, and horses were used to pull the carriages, making it more efficient to move heavier objects.

The first scheduled horse-drawn passenger railways started in 1803 in South London, and the first line in Hungary was established in 1827 between Pest and Kőbánya, but the service only ran for a year. Nevertheless, a nationwide network was planned, and between 1840 and 1846, horse-drawn railways were reintroduced between Pozsony (Bratislava) and Nagyszombat (Trnava) and then Szered (Sered), but in the long term neither the speed nor the capacity could compete with steam. 

However, steam-powered railways were not a success in the cities, so in 1860 the first Hungarian horse-drawn railway was launched in Lippa. In Pest, it appeared six years later, running for the first time between the city center (Kálvin Square) and North Pest (Újpest-Városkapu), and two years later it was available on the Buda side between the Chain Bridge and Zugliget, and between the Chain Bridge and the Main Square in Óbuda. The appearance of the electric trams of 1887 put an end to the days of the horse-drawn railways, with the last service to Margaret Island ending in 1928. 

The last night

In 1884, the capital city issued a decree standardizing the conditions for omnibus travel. Among other things, it stipulated that coaches should be up to seven and a half meters long and two and a half meters wide, must be fitted with signal lamps, and that the interior, which could accommodate ten passengers, could be lit by candles. The turn of the century saw the introduction of double-decker buses with a narrow iron staircase leading to the top. These coaches were the inspiration for the well-known operetta hit "Night on the Roof of the Omnibus", which made its debut in 1926 in a performance of the operetta by Béla Zerkovitz. 

While in 1832 there were five omnibuses carrying around 200,000 passengers a year, by 1912 there were one hundred and sixty-one horse-drawn carriages for 13.4 million passengers. 

These carriages were gradually replaced by the buses introduced in the 1890s, which began regular service in Budapest in March 1915. The last omnibus passed through Villányi Road on 5 November 1929, and one of the journalists of the Magyar Hírlap magazine ('Hungarian Newspaper') wrote of the event. "I can not smile at the downfall of poor omnibuses. With their disappearance a little piece of old Pest disappeared too, and with the old, rattling, rumbling carriages and the jogging horses a piece of the city's charm moved out of the city."  
 

The Mikó Garden 

The first Botanical Garden in Kolozsvár (Cluj) was situated in the Mikó estate. Count Imre Mikó, a Transylvanian politician and historian, donated his fourteen-acre estate, i. e. approximately 80,000 square meters of land, including the neoclassical summer residence, to the Transylvanian Museum Society. Established in 1859 to promote scientific and literary life in Transylvania, the Society’s first director and museum curator was the natural historian and polyhistor Sámuel Brassai, who tried to preserve the English garden character of the original garden when he designed the Botanical Garden. 

He made his own handwritten "Look but don't touch" signs, in an attempt to control the excessive curiosity of visitors and students.

In 1872, the Transylvanian Museum Society transferred the right to use the garden to the new University of Sciences, then named after Franz Joseph, on condition that "the University does not allow the arboretum, which currently exists in the park-like part of the garden and contains almost all the trees and shrubs of Transylvania, to be destroyed". Ágost Kanitz was the university's first botany teacher and the founder of the first Hungarian-language botanical journal. Under his direction, hot and cold greenhouses were built, the former with a minimum temperature of ten degrees Celsius, and the latter with an average temperature of between five and twelve degrees Celsius. 

Kanitz has developed a close working relationship with the botanical gardens in Florence, Bonn, Berlin, Budapest, and elsewhere. As time went on, the university took an increasing share of the garden. In the 1880s, the buildings of the Institute of Botany and the Institute of Zoology were inaugurated, occupying one-fifth of the total area. At the same time, it was the first place in Cluj-Napoca to have electricity, and by the turn of the century, under the direction of botanist Gyula Istvánffi, piped water for irrigation was available. Until then, water was carried to the plants in barrels on donkeys. During this period, several circular pools and a rock garden were also created.  

In 1905, a new era began in the life of the garden with botanist Aladár Richter, who is referred to by many sources as the founder of the garden, and the seven years of his administration are referred to as a real heyday. 

Richter has done much to promote the botanical gardens, informing professionals and the lay public about the latest news and interesting facts in the form of reports and articles. As the park's proportion of green space was decreasing, he dreamt up a new area to be used exclusively for botanical purposes. This is how the plot of land on Majális Street, which was then a holiday park, was brought into view, a twenty-acre area, or around 90,000 square meters, divided by the Gypsy Brook and dotted with fruit trees. Richter bought the land for the institution in 1912 with state aid. 

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One of the botanical garden's greenhouses – Photo: Profimedia - Red Dot

Let’s move! 

The relocation of the garden was thwarted by the First World War, and the growing food shortage led to the cultivation of crops in the shade of the botanical specialties. It was not until the 1920s that the garden was restored to its former glory. Alexandru Borza, then head of the botany department at the university then named after King Ferdinand I, successfully managed the relocation of the botanical garden by 1923, 'building a greenhouse, establishing plant systematics and botanical geography groups, creating an extremely instructive Japanese garden, and even running a well-equipped small meteorological station in the garden', wrote Borza in the May 1945 issue of Transylvania, describing his achievements over two decades. His partner in this challenging task was botanist Gyula Erazmus Nyárády. 

The garden was used for research and teaching purposes until 1925 when it was opened to the public. "The new, modern institution in Kolozsvár (Cluj), which is truly a well-managed botanical garden, will be one of the most well-managed public walkways for the citizens of Kolozsvár (Cluj). 

Last year, 15,000 people visited the garden. 

[...] There is no entrance fee on Monday and Thursday afternoons, but on other days the entrance fee is 5 lei. [...] You can see the flowers and a new series of palms between 4 and 5 pm daily. Any school of the garden can be visited at any time under the guidance of the professors," reported the newspaper Ellentzék ('The Opposition') in April 1927.  

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Statue in the Botanical Garden – Photo: Profimedia - Red Dot

Under the spell of diversity 

Today, the fourteen hectares of botanical gardens are home to eleven thousand different species, "one of the distinctive features of the trees, shrubs, and grasses collected from all parts of the country and the globe is that they seem to have grown here by chance. At first glance, we might have the mistaken impression that we are looking at a patchwork of wild nature. In only a few sections do we see the influence of man's wisdom, knowledge and art," writes the 1952 issue of the Szabad Földműves ('Free Farmer') magazine. 

At the entrance, visitors are greeted by ornamental plants, with a different flowering plant for each season, snowdrops, tulips, or forget-me-nots. The most famous of these is the rose garden, where more than 400 different varieties are on display. The garden then presents the flora and the different types of forests according to their botanical and geographical regions. The rock garden is home to alpine and subalpine plants. The Japanese gardens have a classical feel with stone lanterns, stepping stones, bridges, and tea houses, while the Roman gardens, which showcase Mediterranean species, have several sarcophagi and statues, including one of Ceres. 

In Roman mythology, Ceres is the goddess of motherly love, who also watches over the flora.  

In the 1960s, greenhouses were also set up in the garden on Majális Street, with "huge hot water pools in which exotic aquatic plants flourish. A two-year-old child can easily sit on the huge leaves of a water lily called Victoria Regia, like a big round, green, shiny raft," wrote the Szabad Földműves ('Free Farmer') magazine in 1952. The other greenhouse is a showcase of Australian and Mediterranean flora: home to fig trees, olive trees, citrus trees, pomegranate trees, and araucarias (better known as southern pines). From here, three more greenhouses open up to house succulent plants, bromeliads, and insectivorous plants, while a separate greenhouse houses tropical plants such as bananas, coffee, coconut, and dates. 

The botanical gardens include a water tower, the Institute of Botany, and the Botanical Museum, with over 7,000 species on display. 

Here you will find a unique 'plant collection', or as the experts call it, the Herbarium, with over 500,000 (ed: the current figure is 700,000) pressed plants. There is also a huge collection of fossil plants. The Welwitschia from South Africa, which is related to our pines but bears no resemblance to them, is a marvel. Its two withered leaves can reach a length of tens of meters, as they grow throughout their life from a stump-like trunk," says the November 1970 issue of Hargita magazine.

The botanical garden, now named after Alexandru Borza, is an institution of the Babeş-Bolyai University and is free to visit with a ticket.  

The publication of this article was supported by the Carola Association.
 

Remember the summer of 2022? Sunflowers lined up lifelessly, their heads down, burnt out, the drought-cracked earth spread out beside them like forgotten ancient mosaics. It was a loud cry for help from Petőfi's endless prairie, and we refused to believe our ears and clung to the idea that we had 'just had a bad year'.

The Great Plain has always been a dry and hot region, but not as hot as now

Attila Szeredi still feels that the drought threat has not gone away. He has been working in the village of Kiszombor in the Great Plain for more than three decades: they have 1,100 hectares of farmland and 110 hectares of forest. They experienced the big change in 2022 when they saw that not enough water was being added to the soil and the moisture deficit was compounding because there was no rain. "In the past, we had these extremes, we had wet and dry years, but the soil didn't have the water deficit that it has now because now there is less water in the lower layers.

The drought is compounded by the fact that there is basically no winter, so we are under more pressure from both fungi and insects than in the weather we used to have. 

In the past, we had a 20-30 mm rainfall zone across the country. Now we are seeing that these have become localized, with only a few millimeters falling in our areas in the Great Plain," the farmer concludes. 

At such times, many of us tend to visualize the image of the shadoof on the Plain, and we just shrug, because, in our memories, the Great Plain has always been a dry and warm region of Hungary. But not as dry as it is now!

"When I was a kid, the summers were hot enough there, but now the 40-degree heat waves have become longer, and the brutal thing is that there is no relief," recalls Gábor Timár. According to the geophysicist, this is clearly due to climate change, and the river regulation of the early 19th century also contributed to the drying out of the Great Plain, as the floodplains are no longer flooded by the water from the Carpathians, mostly from snowmelt. Despite this, the geophysicist does not think that the regulation was a bad idea at the time since in the 19th century it was an important and achievable goal to convert the extensive marshlands into areas suitable for agriculture. 

"Nobody expected that in 100-120 years' time, this would reduce the adaptability of the landscape in a climate change nobody knew was coming," the scientist stresses. 

With sufficient rainfall, this would not be such a problem, but the rain hasn't come for years. And one of the main reasons for this is not to be found in the sky, but in the ground, or more precisely in the soil and the way we cultivate it.  

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Photo: Flickr

April showers bring May flowers

In Hungarian, this saying goes, "May rain is worth gold". According to Gábor Timár, this is why the May rains are worth double gold this year because if we turn to June with dusty, dry soil, that could be even more serious than the drought of 2022. The usual rainy period at the beginning of June can be triggered by cold fronts, but the heavy rain usually comes when thunderstorms develop as a result of the ground-level moisture, the rapid rise in air temperature due to high daytime peak temperatures or fronts, and the 'swirling' effect of wind direction changing with altitude. However, ground-level moisture is increasingly absent from the picture, partly as a consequence of soil depletion through soil tillage. 

"There used to be a wetland here, with a different soil structure and vegetation covering the land. You have to think of it a bit like a swamp. The water was stored in the soil, there under the leaves of the marsh vegetation. If you start plowing this with heavy machinery, which digs up the soil about a couple of inches or so, you create what's called a ploughshare surface, which you also compact every year, so it acts as a barrier layer. 

Before this, the top two meters of soil used to store water easily, but now only about 25 centimeters is suitable. Since wheat, maize, and sunflowers cannot completely shade the soil, the upper layers dry out quickly during summer heat waves. 

And when large amounts of rain fall on the ground in a short period of time, the ploughshare layer also prevents the ground from absorbing the water and inland flooding occurs," says the geophysicist. 

According to Attila Szeredi, soil degradation is the result of the last 60 years, and recovery takes a long time. He sees that there have been some positive developments, for example, conferences on "no-till" or "min-till", i.e. crop production technologies that partially or completely abandon soil cultivation, but farmers are still forced to go their own way. "Some farmers are open, receptive and see the need for change, but there is also a part of farmers who are not and keep doing everything by habit," he adds.

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Photo: Freepic

No-tillage, re-greening, biodiversity enhancement

The Soil Restoration Farmers Association, of which he is a member, seeks to disseminate and share farming knowledge and practical experience that physically and chemically reduce the impact on the soil and increase its organic matter content. At the same time, I have spoken to several farmers who would like to have centralized retraining opportunities where they can access science-based information. Others are completely put off because "the forced, subsidy-linked practice of re-greening has also set very bad examples in their area" and they believe that "greening is more of a business than an environmentally conscious mission".

Attila Szeredi agrees that no-till is not a cure-all for every problem, but it can definitely improve the situation. "In addition, there is a great need for change above the soil surface, as a large percentage of the country's land is sown with grain and oilseed crops. We produce minimal other crops that would increase biodiversity, and we have little manure to return to the soil, which we are trying to replace with artificial fertilizers," the farmer concludes. 

Gábor Timár believes that it would be important to model where and in what distribution it would be worthwhile to reforest certain areas to restore the field for storms. In his opinion, this would not be such a big blow to the economy, as there is plenty of land that is not of good enough quality to produce a large harvest.  

"In terms of water management, we believe that reforestation can bring good results, and we believe that sooner or later the support system will move in this direction." 

" Out of four million hectares of arable land, one million are certainly areas with unfavourable conditions. We should give them all back to nature, and there is a professional argument for doing so, and I think that sooner or later this will be forced out of the system," says the farmer.

Good practices do not work immediately

The geophysicist points out that whatever we do, we have to take into account that on a global scale, the Earth has about 20-25 years of inertia, which means that if we were to return to the emission levels of the 1800s (which is not going to happen now), it would still be 20 years before we would notice that anything had happened to the climate. 

Both Attila Szeredi and Gábor Timár agree that real change can only be achieved through top-down measures. Politicians need to be persuaded to pay attention to the Great Plain, and in addition to a general emphasis on climate protection, a system needs to be developed that allows farmers to return land that is not of very good quality to nature, without their livelihoods being at risk. 

It would also be important to reform agricultural education so that the transfer of knowledge to future farmers would not be the individual action of an open-minded educator, but a systemic transfer of knowledge. We, the lay public, can participate in change not only through our electoral behaviour, but also through our conscious choices, which are not just about taking an environmentally friendly action, but about radically changing our way of thinking, passing it on, and answering the question in our everyday lives: "What can I do today for my environment?"
 

(The area that was historically the northern part of the Kingdom of Hungary, but today is mostly Slovakian territory, is called ‘Felvidék’ in Hungarian, i.e.: "Upper Hungary" or "the Highlands" – translator’s note)

Debrőd (Debrad, Slovakia), near Kassa (Kosice), was a 100 % Hungarian village until 1945. Géza Dunajszky was born here, the third son of a wealthy farmer. He was two years old when he first met his father, returning from French captivity, who knew only that he had been conceived. "The people in the village told me a lot about him, and I also knew what he looked like because I had to pray under his photo. I was sitting on top of the cherry tree eating when I heard Giza, my father's sister, and a woman in the courtyard of the local pub talking: 'Giza, your brother is home!' 

"I knew it was him, and I ran to my mother yelling that Daddy was home! I even remember my mother making pancakes and bean soup," he recalls. 

The father didn't talk much about his years in France. He worked for a peasant in Brittany, who was himself a minority among the French. "He urged my father not to return home, to stay in the country and make his family follow him, but he wanted to go home. He later regretted his decision. He heard that they were taking Hungarians to the Malenky robot (forced labour in the Soviet Union). When he took the train back home, he answered the question of the Russian officer on board in French, so he did not get caught."

Small hoe and sickle under the Christmas tree instead of toys

The young Géza had to grow up very fast: his parents involved him in farm work from the age of four. The family owned 45 hectares of land, including pastures and woods. "My Christmas presents were not toys, but a small hoe, a small sickle, and a small rake," he recalls. - I used to get up at 4 a.m. to feed the animals in the poultry yard, do the sweeping, help milk the cows, and remove the manure from under them. In the winter we burned lime and charcoal. After completing my tasks, I went to school. It ate me up inside, but I got it done. It helped in many situations to know how to do these things."

Hard physical work has made him more resilient and stronger. He could only study and read in the evenings, often by candlelight, which he placed in a bucket to keep the hay he rested in from catching fire. Despite all this, he looks back on his first seventeen years as a good time. "The village is in a beautiful valley with the St. John's brook running through it. An island of peace and quiet."

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He wrote three books about his childhood and the history of his family - Photo: Géza Dunajszky

Killing even their memories

Géza also needed to grow strong spiritually at an early age. He was still a very young child when, at a family gathering on Christmas Eve, a relative began to talk about the massacre in Přerov. On 18 June 1945, the Czechoslovak army arrested nearly three hundred inhabitants of Dobšina and the surrounding area and took them to the Swedish Trenches near Přerov, where they were made to dig a pit and shot into it. 

"They killed kids like him," an older woman, Márta, said pointing at me. That sentence was etched in my mind forever."

Another mass murder during the Beneš era had an indirect but even greater impact on his life. On the orders of the Czechoslovak president, hundreds of civilians were murdered by the Czechoslovak infantry regiment No. 17 on the outskirts of the village of Pozsonyliget (Petržalka) in peacetime in the three months following 8 May 1945. In July, ninety Hungarian young soldiers, POWs were also executed on their way home from captivity. Géza's two cousins were also killed, which he learned about months later.

"We were working in the cornfield when my aunt came to us. She turned to my mother crying. "I just wish I knew where they are buried, where I could turn under God's blue sky to say at least a prayer for them." I hugged her and told her that when I grew up, I would look for their graves." The two boys, József and István, were taken to Germany as forced conscripts in the autumn of '44, the younger not even fourteen. His parents hid him in the chimney, but he was still found.

Géza still finds it difficult to talk about the tragedy, as he had to keep his grief bottled up for a long time. For decades, it was forbidden to talk about Beneš's atrocities against Hungarians –  until 1989, anyone who spoke about them was imprisoned because they were declared military secrets.

He had personally experienced the deportation and subsequent expulsion of Hungarians from Czechoslovakia from '45 onwards. It applied to anyone who declared himself Hungarian. After the World War, 750,000 Hungarians lived in Upper Hungary, but after the expulsions, this number fell to around 450,000.

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Hungarians deported from Upper Hungary at a railway station - Photo: Fortepan / László Rózsa

In 1947, Géza's aunt, and later his dear neighbour's family, had to leave their home. As a child, all he could sense was that they would be taken away in a carriage without a farewell, under military guard.

It was years later that he learned of the humiliation his aunt had suffered at the border, stripped not only of her jewels but even her clothes. 

Beaten for speaking Hungarian

He had been going to Hungarian school since '51, but he had to learn Slovak, which was made compulsory not only for children but for adults as well. "In the Slovak school, where my brothers started compulsory education, the Slovak teacher used to beat the students who spoke Hungarian," he says. 

There was a lot of fighting between his parents over the language issue. His mother came from a village where people of Slovak origin lived and went to Slovak schools, so she was not averse to the Beneš politics, which his father was totally against. He once declared that he was unable to learn 'this gibberish language', which resulted in someone denouncing him for insulting Slovaks. As a punishment, he was to be sent to work in the Jáchymov uranium mine, which was the most severe punishment at the time. Only through the intervention of a friend of his wife's did he escape forced labour. 
"My mother had a friend who was the head of the council. She brainwashed her in such a way that she secretly ‘reslovakized’, i.e. she declared herself Slovak. I only found out after her death when I found a document about it. She didn't want us to know about it, so she hid it among the property papers of the animals."

Géza and his classmates were reluctant to learn Slovak. "The year of our graduation, the class went on strike: we didn't prepare for class and didn't even utter a word when the Slovak teacher came into the classroom." 

"This teacher, to get us expelled from the high school, smeared feces on the pictures of Slovak writers displayed in the school. But his fingerprints gave him away. He was dismissed."

Despite all this, he passed the graduation exam in the Slovak language as well. Thus he was admitted to college and later became a teacher of mathematics and music. In order not to need his parents' support (his father had just recovered from an illness), he started working while attending college. "I vowed not to ask them for a penny. I started writing features for a couple of newspapers, which paid me a pretty good fee every month. I made more money than I did later on as a trainee teacher."

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Young Géza in the rank of lieutenant, before his demobilization - Photo: Géza Dunajszky

Collecting folk songs and interception

After his studies, he started teaching at the school in Felsőkirály and later became headmaster in Pográny (Pohranice). During his teaching career, he led several choirs and folklore groups, played in wind orchestras, and became a founding member, assistant conductor, and organizing secretary of the Central Choir of Hungarian Teachers in Czechoslovakia. He soon got married and had two children. Later, he got a job at the Central Committee of the Cultural Organization of Hungarian Workers in Czechoslovakia (CSEMADOK) in Pozsony (Bratislava). As head of the art department, he organized several central Csemadok events a year, such as drama, folk orchestra, pop music, and choir competitions.

Together with his colleagues and local ethnographers, they collected folk songs, material, and spiritual ethnographic material in several places in Upper Hungary. "We have managed to collect a huge spiritual treasure and have recorded several new folk songs. It took twenty years until they were all published."
Géza remembers this time as the best of his life, and not only for his professional success: it was also when he met his second wife, Éva, with whom he had a daughter.

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Géza as principal of the Pográny primary school - Photo: Géza Dunajszky

Although he had no political role, he was kept under surveillance by the communist political police: when he joined Csemadok, he was reported by agents, probably including his own secretary at the time. "One day I had to make an urgent phone call, so I went to his office. The phone started ringing just then. When I put the receiver to my ear, I heard the voice of my folklorist colleague Imre Németh talking to politician Miklós Duray. 

Later I found out that the phone also had a player that played back the recorded conversations, and I accidentally pressed that button. 

Anyway, we suspected that we were being bugged because when we started talking, we heard a click and the sound quality was reduced because of the recording." 

Started research later in life

In retirement, Géza began to research the fate of the Hungarians who were persecuted during the Beneš era and killed in the massacres and to search for the graves of the ninety soldiers killed in the village of Pozsonyliget. Even though almost 80 years have passed since then, except for the historian Kálmán Janics, no one has addressed the issue.

"I was sure that there were still some who had managed to escape from the death camp and were still alive. I posted a call on Facebook for people who were involved to contact me, and more and more people got in touch."

He aims to make this tragedy an integral part of the national memory of Hungary as a whole so that people learn from it and do not make the same mistake again. He later wrote three books about the period and had a memorial erected to the murdered victims. He is now working to have gravestones for the young soldiers from Debrőd and other areas of Upper Hungary in the cemetery in Pozsonyligetfalu (Petržalka).

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With his granddaughter, Ella – Photo: Géza Dunajszky

As for what gave him the strength to endure the ordeal, he says: "You can get a blow that knocks you down, and sometimes you fall as hard as possible. 

But think while you're lying there how you can get up, and if you have to, stay down for a while if that's the smarter choice. 

Don't jerk around, don't try to ram anyone when you see you're outnumbered. But afterwards, stand up and do what your conscience tells you with a steady back. That's what I'm doing now."
 

You've come home from Iceland for a few days. What are you doing out there?

I'm on a research exchange until July, as part of my doctoral studies in Budapest. I'm working on sustainability communication, trying to map how organizations and companies communicate to get people to change their behaviour and live more environmentally conscious.

Anilla Till, 29, a PhD student at Corvinus University, holds a Master's degree from Jönköping University in Sweden but has also studied in Helsinki and Paris. She currently lives in Iceland and works as a project manager in a Hungarian agency.

 But I understand when people think that they cannot do anything about climate change on their own. It's easier to understand when we talk about the health of the planet: clean air, clean water, and green plants. People are more willing to change their behaviour to achieve this. While if we say to keep warming below one and a half degrees, the average person looks at you and says 'OK, but what does that mean?' What should I do? When we're out in nature and we smell the fragrances, see the colours, and hear the birds chirping, we really get a sense of why it's worth protecting our planet. Well, that's eye-opening.

Your return home is no coincidence, as a documentary called 2550 was made about you, as last summer you completed the 2550-kilometre National Blue Circle in 72 days. What is the difference between the Blue Trail and the Blue Circle?

One is a part of the other. The National Blue Circle consists of three trails: the National Blue Trail, the Rockenbauer Pál South Transdanubian Blue Trail, and the Blue Trail on the Great Plain. If you combine them, they make up one circle, the Blue Circle that runs all around the whole country.

How did you become a hiker? I understand you didn't even like weekend hikes very much before.

My first long-distance hike was El Camino, the world's most famous pilgrimage in Spain. When I was 18, we went on a trip to Santiago de Compostela, the endpoint of the Camino. I really liked it and thought it would be fun to do it one day. Six years later, I did it starting from Paris. 

I wanted to do something similar back in Hungary, so I first walked the Hungarian Pilgrim's Route, and then I realized that the Blue Circle was similar. I put it off for a few years, and then last May the time and the opportunity came. 

Whose idea was it to turn the challenge into a documentary?

The whole was Ferenc Mándi's idea, the director, producer, and all-rounder of the film. We used to be in the same study group at university, and we are old friends. When he heard I was going hiking, he suggested we make a film out of it. I left on 19 May 2023 and arrived at the end of July. That's how much time I had because I was planning to go to a festival after that. (laughs) I had exactly 72 days between my last class at university and my first day at the festival.

What did your typical day look like?

I woke up around five in the morning. Early morning hiking is good because nature around you is still asleep. I usually hiked 35.5 kilometres a day, which may seem like a lot at first, but once you get used to it, you can manage. I always stopped for breakfast, sometimes had a soft drink at a pub, had lunch later, and met lots of interesting people. I arrived at the accommodation in the early evening, washed my clothes, did some home office work and went to bed early. 

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Photo: Ferenc Mándi

I'm sure many people wonder how safe it is to hike alone as a woman.

There were about five to ten nights that I spent camping, and many people warned me against sleeping out alone. But the first time I was so tired I didn't have the energy to be afraid, I fell asleep straight away. True, my family was worried, but they always knew where I was, I was available, except when there was no signal. The more time went by, the safer I felt. 

I was drawn by the experience of spending more time outside in nature. It's a great physical and mental challenge, very strong team building with yourself. 

I was curious to see whether I could do it and what kind of person I would be in the end.

And? What did you find?

I realised that in the future I would not want to sit in front of a screen as much as I do now. I can't change that at the moment, but later I would like to do a job that doesn't involve spending 9 am to 4 pm in front of a screen. It also made me realise what a great place Hungary is, how diverse it is, and how nice the people are. It was a great adventure! I would prescribe it to everyone, we can learn a lot about ourselves, our physical condition, but especially our mind. It's a great way to learn about yourself. But if someone goes hiking and feels bad, or doesn't feel good on their own, that can be a useful lesson too.

Who did you meet along the way?

I'll try to say something that's not in the film, to avoid spoilers. There was a time when I ran out of water and I rang people's doorbells to see if they could give me some. When I arrived in a small village, I was very often approached on the street. And in the pubs, the slightly drunk men would often say, well, they wouldn't walk that much for sure...

Since you mention water, let's talk about nutrition. You're a vegan, and you mention in the film, that there were times when you couldn't eat until the afternoon because you couldn't find a grocery store. How do you deal with a situation like that?

Obviously, I was hungry, and I kept a small portion of food for luck in my backpack, but I didn't want to eat it because it wasn't an emergency. After a while, I got into a routine of eating, I cooked and prepared very simple things. 

I wouldn't say it was a balanced diet, but I had consciously eaten more before the hike because I figured I'd need it. I lost about seven kilos. 

You had some rough moments along the way, but these are not shown in the film, you only told us about them afterwards. For example, when you sat in the woods and cried. Was it a conscious decision to keep your intimacy private?

No, there was no such goal. When there's a deep moment in the woods, I think it's very unrealistic to take out my GoPro from my bag to film myself crying. Anyway, the way the shoot was done was that the director came on shooting days, and I had a GoPro with me so that if I wanted to shoot something, I could. I shot mainly just stock footage.

I really missed my loved ones. We kept in touch online and by phone, but it's not the same as having a coffee together. It was not an option to get on the bus or train and meet up. True, once I spent the night in our family home in Pásztó.

What equipment did you take with you?

Tent, camp mattress, sleeping bag, a few changes of clothes. I used a hydration system: I filled a flat container with water, put it in the backpack, and drank through a hose. You can drink without taking off your backpack. I also took a tablet for work. I also had pepper spray, but I never had to use it.

At first I went with a bigger backpack, in which my tent fit, but after a few weeks I changed it to a smaller one, because I lost a lot of weight, so it was important to have a lighter bag. I used up two hiking boots, both of them were used, they lasted about two thousand kilometres each. So now I don't even have hiking boots.

The cost was about 10 thousand forints a day. I did not receive any financial sponsorship, but four companies and organisations supported me with equipment, hiking gear, media coverage, Blue Trail hiking products and accommodation.

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Photo: Virág Mészáros

Were there any parts of the country that were new discoveries for you?

Of course, I've completely bypassed the two endpoints of the National Blue Trail, the mountain peak of Írott-kő and the village of Hollóháza. I really liked the mountains of Zemplén and the Őrség region. Walking through the poor villages of Nyírség (Eastern Hungary), I often wondered how lucky I was. I was able to get away from work, I could save money to go hiking. Many people, especially in these villages, would surely not be able to make such a decision. 

It's great that I completed the Blue Circle, but it's also a huge privilege. 

I set off from Hármashatár hill in Budapest and that's where I arrived. When I finally got to Nagyszénás Peak and could see Budapest, that was wonderful.

Who would you like to set an example for?

On the one hand, the film is for people who are Blue Trail hikers or want to be Blue Trail hikers. I hope to inspire a lot of people to do it, and for those who have already done it, it will feel nostalgic. The other is a more general message. If you really want to achieve something, it's up to you, your commitment, to make it happen: a new job, a business, writing a book, whatever. 

The documentary 2550 - Walking Around a Country was screened in all the Cinema City cinemas across the country on 23 May 2024. As the screenings in Budapest were sold out, it was also shown in the capital on 24 May. 

Do you think this could be a good promotional film for Hungary?

This is an interesting question because I think it would be good if the Blue Trail and the Blue Circle were more accessible to foreigners. I once heard of a Canadian man who wanted to do the Blue Trail of the Great Plains but couldn't find any information about it. It would be nice if the booklets were also available in English.

Was it in the cards that you would not succeed in what you had planned?

I have never done such a long hike. I knew I could do three or four weeks, but I didn't know what would happen after that. As I kept going forward, I felt that the only way it would fail was if I had a health problem or had to stop for family reasons. It was more the logistics that were difficult: when I started, I still had a big doctoral exam to do, which I finally completed during the Blue Circle. After a day's hiking, I drove up to Pest in the evening with my best friend, took the exam in the morning and returned to the Blue in the afternoon.  

Will there be another hike?

Yes, probably in Iceland. I would like to improve my ability to spend more time in the wilderness, even alone, in nomadic conditions.

You have a mountain pendant on your necklace. Was it with you on the Blue Circle?

Yes, I bought it at a design fair in Budapest, I really liked it, it's perfect for hiking.
 

From woodcarving to church architecture

The historical region of Máramaros (Maramures) is a part of present-day Romania (Partium) and Ukraine ( Transcarpathia), named after the river Mara that flows through the region. Three-quarters of its territory is made up of mountain forests and pastures, and its most significant building material is wood, which has become important not only in everyday life but also in religious architecture. So it is not surprising that the tradition of building wooden churches dates back to the 16th century. 

The tradition of carpentry and woodcarving is still preserved today, and carving motifs such as the sun, moon, stars, or the cord are still found in churches. 

The Land of Wood churches

More than three hundred Orthodox and Greek Catholic wooden churches once dotted the Maramures countryside, but only ninety-three remain today. Eight of the listed buildings were declared World Heritage sites in 1999, thus making immortal the monuments of ecclesiastical and vernacular wooden architecture. The churches were typically built between the 17th and 19th centuries, mainly of oak and pine, and even the nails were made of wood, for lack of metal. 

Eight wood churches in Máramaros on the World Heritage List

Wood Church of the Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple, Barcánfalva (Bârsana)
Wood Church of Saint Nicholas, Budfalva (Budesti)
Wood Church of the Holy Piroska, Desze (Desesti)
Wood Church of the Holy Archangels, Dióshalom (Șurdești)
Wood Church of Nativity of the Virgin, Jód (Ieud)
Wood Church of Saint Michael and Gabriel, Nyárfás (Plopiș)
Wood Church of Saint Michael and Gabriel, Rogoz (Rogoz)
Wood Church of the Holy Piroska, Sajómező (Poienile Izei)

The timber-framed churches with their tall, thin bell towers and shingle-covered roofs bear the hallmarks of Mountain architecture, but they also show a synthesis of East and West: the Byzantine-style floor plan of the churches is matched by a Gothic form. This particular architectural solution is not the only reason for the World Heritage designation: the paintings on the church interiors are also of particular value.

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Photo: Profimedia - Red Dot

Without perspective 

"The inside of the church is stunning, with no perspective anywhere. The 18th-century painters of Máramaros did not really use perspective very much, instead they used the 2-dimensional drawing method that was known and widespread before the Renaissance. This means that these painted figures do not have a three-dimensional body, but only an outline and the elements of the scenes that should have been represented behind each other are here more than once on top of each other,' states an article in the Korunk Magazine  No. 2022/4 about the Orthodox Church of St. Piroska in Desze (Desesti), built in 1770, but the statement is true for all wooden churches in Máramaros region.
The colourful 1780s paintings of the building in Desze, framed with flowers by the painter Radu Munteanu, were discovered in the 1990s under a thick layer of soot on the wall.

Toader Hodor and Ion Plohod painted the Baroque-style murals of the Church of the Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple in Barcánfalva (Bârsana), which made the building a World Heritage Site. 

The wooden church, built in 1720, has had an adventurous fate, having been moved from its original site to the Iza River valley in 1739 and back sixty years later. 

The numbered wooden beams used for the rebuilding are a testament to this. The church was completely renovated in the early 1990s, when the village's new Orthodox religious centre, a monastery and a church were built, with a 62-metre-high wooden tower, now the second tallest in Europe.

The oldest ones

"The wooden church of Jód (Ieud), however, is a well-established, thousand-arched wonder, a visible symbol of the people's building spirit. Besides the rough, hard work of the earth and the forest, at least the little thing of beauty in the form of the house of the Lord shall be given to the earthly eye." – this is what in the 1990 issue of Harghita Népe, Zoltán Czegő wrote about the church of the Nativity of the Virgin, which according to some sources was already standing in the 14th century. However, recent research suggests that it was built in the 1610s, making it one of the oldest churches in Máramaros. Built of pine beams and with small windows, the interior walls are painted in full, and even the inside of the door is decorated with a picture of St Christopher, the patron saint of travellers.

In Budfalva (Budesti), not just one, but two churches were built in honour of St Nicholas, a hundred years apart. One of the oldest churches on the World Heritage List, known as a cathedral because of its size, has been standing in the centre of the village since 1643. At the beginning of the 20th century, women began to attend the liturgy, which involved enlarging the windows and cutting new openings in the wall, but the work also damaged several murals. 

Besides icons painted on centuries-old glass and wood, the church also houses relics such as the chainmail shirt and helmet of the famous local outlaw, the brave Pintye, and the flag of Ferenc Rákóczi II. 

The oldest of the wooden churches in Máramaros that have been awarded World Heritage status is the Church of St. Piroska in Sajómező (Poienile Izei), built in 1604. Saint Piroska, the daughter of King László, was one of the most revered empresses of the Byzantine Empire, and was canonised by the Orthodox Church, her cult being adopted by the Catholic Church.

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A mural in the church of St. Piroska in Desze (Desesti) - Photo: Profimedia - Red Dot

The glory of archangels

The Greek Catholic wood church in Dióshalom (Șurdești), built in 1721, was consecrated in honour of the Archangels St Michael and Gabriel. Its fifty-four-metre-high tower not only stands out from its immediate surroundings, but until the 1990s it was the tallest wooden church tower in Europe. Another special element of the building is the ladder in the entrance hall leading up to the gallery, carved from a single tree.

The church in Dióshalom (Șurdești) inspired the wooden church in Nyárfás (Plopiș), built seventy-five years later, with a tower of "only" forty-seven metres high, also dedicated to the archangels, as was the church of the Archangels St Michael and Gabriel in Rogoz. Burnt down during the Tatar invasion of 1661, it took two years to rebuild the building from elm. It underwent a complete renovation in 1717, and its interior paintings were done by Radu

This article was sponsored by the Carola Association.
 

Your home village is well known for its traditions. Did you absorb these local customs as a child?

Yes, you might say I was born into it. My parents encouraged and educated me on how to keep the traditions of Szék. They were the ones who introduced me to folk dancing and folk songs at a relatively early age. I started dancing when I was ten years old, my mother and father are folk dancers too.

I inherited most of my clothes from my mother, who also taught me how to sew. 

There was also a strong love of tradition in the village community. Whenever we went somewhere to perform with the dance group, it was always a special occasion, we enjoyed each other's company, and over the years we have developed close friendships. Although we no longer go to performances, there is still a good relationship between the members and we get together whenever we can.

The city of Kolozsvár (Cluj-Napoca) is 60 kilometers from Szék, you went to school there and that is where you work now.  What is your relationship with the city?

I currently live in Szék, from where I commute to work in Kolozsvár. Daily commuting is not my favourite thing, but I'm used to it. I don't like the hustle and bustle of the big city, even as a high school student I couldn't wait for the weekend to go home from Kolozsvár. Most of my friends stayed in the city, but I went straight to the station after the last class. I feel at home in Szék, I grew up here and I plan to live here. I am lucky because I married a man from the village who has the same plans. I like the fact that almost everyone knows everyone here, so it's a bit like living our lives together, rather than isolated like in a big city.

Community is also very much part of your work, as you work with students in the Mathias Corvinus Collegium team in Transylvania, organizing activities for them.

Yes, I really like working with the students, and being close to them. I have been working at MCC for almost three years and I am currently the Deputy Coordinator of the High School Program in Transylvania.

The best thing about my job, apart from the variety and dynamism, is that we work for a community. 

With our team, we are constantly striving to teach students new things and provide them with training that will help them get ahead in life. We strive to create opportunities where students from Cluj can get to know other students from Szeklerland, but also meet MCC students from Hungary.

Does this mean that education and talent management are close to your heart?

That's right, so much so that I can see myself working as a teacher in the future, which is why I'm currently a Maths student and in my spare time I help local students catch up in the subject. I was originally thinking about a career in civil engineering, but I realised that I wanted to live and work in a more interactive way, being around people. There, my job would have consisted of sitting in front of a computer and doing Maths.

To what extent has folk dance remained a part of your life?

We used to organize balls with the group that came together through dance years ago, but there are fewer and fewer of them now. However, we still celebrate the name days of the most popular names in the village: Márton, Pista, János and Zsuzsanna. On the name day of Zsuzsanna we have a big dance, it's an old tradition, as well as everyone dresses up in Szék folk costumes. In addition, the girls and women who bear the name Zsuzsanna prepare a treat. Around midnight, the men join together to sing a toast to Zsuzsanna, and then we, who have prepared some kind of cake, offer them a round of treats. Typically, we make funnel cakes, Zsuzsi-kifli and doughnuts.

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Photo: Anikó Moldvai

Did you meet your husband through the dance group?

No, he doesn't dance folk dance. I have known him for a long time, but we only noticed each other four years ago. Before the pandemic, we used to go down to the village center, what we call 'the market', to get together and talk, that's where it all started. Although he grew up in a family where keeping traditions was less of a priority, he was open to wearing Szék folk costumes at our wedding.

How did you prepare for the big day?

In keeping with tradition, a few days before the wedding, the women of the village came to the family house to bake the cakes.

Zsuzsi Serestély prepared my traditional tiara, with the obligatory elements, like rosemary, small roses, and silk ribbons called 'angel hair'. 

The groom and the best man also had their bouquets put together. The civil ceremony was not held on the same day, but a week before the big day, but we wore folk costumes for that, too. My mother put the dress and the attire for the occasion on me. On the day of the wedding, my fiancé and I were both in folk costume, and in the evening we changed, and I put on the white wedding dress then. 

 

What did the ceremony look like?

At my request, almost everyone - parents, friends, acquaintances - was in traditional costume at the wedding. We had 12 groomsmen and 10 bridesmaids, they also wore traditional folk costumes from Szék. According to custom, the night before, my fiancé and I assigned who would be paired with whom, and the groomsmen had to go and ask the girls, and they had to recite a poem. According to tradition, the wedding procession started from the groom's house, marched down the street singing and accompanied by a band, and came for me, the bride.

It is interesting that when the groom arrives at the bride's house with the procession, the gate of the bride's house is closed, and the groom's best man has to "beg" to be let in, and there is always a playful "argument". Then the wedding party came in, I waited in another room as my fiancé couldn't see me yet. It is customary to bring an unmarried girl and then a married woman to the groom, and only for the third time is the bride brought to the groom, all the while wonderful rhymed lines of poetry are recited.

After that, we had the farewell - it was very beautiful and touching for me. Then we proceeded to the church, also with music, with the guests walking behind us. 

After the ceremony, we headed to the groom's house, where I recited a poem to my mother-in-law, asking her to welcome me. 

Then the party started.

What other old traditions did you follow at the wedding?

The last time I had my hair braided was when I got married. According to tradition, as long as you are a girl, you must wear your hair braided and also wear a headscarf, except when you are a bridesmaid or taking communion. In the old days, at dawn on the wedding day, it was customary for the bride to make her hair tied up in a bun, and from then on she was obliged to wear a bun only. In my case, it was a little different, I got my bun not on that day, but on the Sunday of the week after the wedding. I went to church with my hair in a bun first as a new bride and my husband as a new man. This is also a compulsory custom, although it used to be the rule that after the wedding, the new bride could not leave the house for a week, only on Sunday morning, when she went to church. I didn't stay at home for a week, but I wore my hair in a bun during the church service.

Did you also go to church in traditional costume?

Yes, we wear folk costumes to church quite often, it's also an old tradition here in Szék. When I was confirmed, I went to church every Sunday morning and afternoon for a year in a traditional costume with my peers. Among the older people, almost everyone wears their traditional folk attire every day. One of the most distinctive parts of this is the baggy, starched, pleated sleeves of the shirt, but I could also mention the shawl, the various skirts, aprons, the waistcoat, the boots, and for men the blue waistcoat or the green sweater, and the straw hat. 

It is very important what we wear and when we wear it. For example, it makes a difference which skirt you wear to dance, and which one to church, or which shawl you wear on weekdays, and which one to Sunday services. 

Moreover, you should also make a difference whether you are wearing it to church in the morning, or in the afternoon.

What are your plans for the future?

My husband and I are currently building our home in Szék, and we are looking forward to it. I am planning to have a room in my home where I would keep all the embroidered tablecloths, pillowcases, and all the decorative objects, just like I used to have in my family's house. And I will continue to keep the traditions, it's part of my life.
 

Deep beneath the Buda Hills, under the Rózsadomb district to be precise, lies the largest water-filled cave system in Hungary, which is considered to be the largest thermal cave in the world. The Molnár János Cave is the water conduit for the Boltív and Alagút springs, and the cold karst water from the Buda Hills and the thermal spring water from the depths supplies the Malom Lake and the Lukács Spa and Swimming Pool. The cave, which has been a protected area since 1982, has a constant temperature of 22-23 degrees Celsius, regardless of the season, and is only accessible to qualified divers, mainly for research purposes. 

The history of the artificial mill lake on today's Frankel Leó Road dates back to the 16th century. The lake, which is fed by hot springs in winter and summer, was created by the Turks, as was the gunpowder mill that stands there. In 1686, under Habsburg rule, the latter was converted into a traditional mill and continued to operate under the name of the Emperor's Mill until the 19th century. In 1806, the Császárfürdő ('Emperor's Baths'), a hospital of the Hospitaller Order of Saint John of God, was opened on the lakeshore, which was rebuilt in the second half of the century, and its neoclassical wing was built according to the plans of József Hild.  At the turn of the 20th century, the Lukács Bath House, designed by Rezső Ray, with Moorish features and reminiscent of Turkish baths, was built and soon took over the role of the Emperor's Bath.  

Following the spring

The natural thermal springs of the Buda Hills were known even to the Romans, and the area known as Felhévíz hides a number of thermal karst caves, most of which were discovered by accident, including the system of passages known for many years as the Malomtavi Cave. In 1858, the pharmacist János Molnár, in search of the springs that feed the present-day Lukács Baths, found a cleft in the side of József Hill. The curious natural scientist suspected a water-filled cave above the water level of Mill Lake inside the mountain. 

He and a colleague ventured down to see the cave for themselves, and although they could not determine the extent of the cave, they explored the accessible parts and made a detailed analysis of the water they found. 

An attempt was made to drain the lake in order to find the spring, but the water-filled tunnels made further exploration impossible. Molnár shared his discovery with the public in 1858, and his first description of the cave was published in a medical journal, the "Orvosi Hetilap", followed a year later by a study in the yearbook of the Hungarian Royal Natural History Society. Molnár was the first to study the springs that fed the baths, and he also analysed the water and temperature of the cave in detail, and even made drawings of this natural wonder.  

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The Mill Lake – Photo: Wikimedia Commons

For advanced divers only 

For decades, only small-scale explorations were carried out due to a lack of appropriate technology, and few people undertook the life-threatening operation, as they had to dive through a small iron door and then down a narrow passage into the unknown depths. The first more detailed survey of the cave was carried out by Ferenc Papp and Sándor Tarics in 1937, followed in 1953 by one of the first Budapest dives of light diving in the Malom Lake by Dr. Hubert Kessler, Ödön Rádai and Attila Chambre, who attempted one of the first Budapest dives of light diving in Hungary with oxygen breathing equipment provided by the fire brigade, but without success. 

In 1959, after several unsuccessful attempts, István Holly was the first person to descend into the water with a simple diving mask and a waterproof flashlight, and then swim through two temporarily submerged passages, known as siphons. 

"Beyond that, there was a low cave, with barely an inch of air between the water and the ceiling. Soon the cave was completely filled with water. Swimming in, however, he found that the passage ended here. [...] The next day they found two completely dry rooms 4 stories high. After a few test dives, it turned out that this was not the whole cave, the water, in some places more than 10 metres deep, covered a large system of caverns," the University Newspaper reported on the discovery, which had been awaited for decades. Then outside help arrived, "using frogman equipment to penetrate the water-filled cave system, several underwater passages were found. The maximum depth they reached was 15 metres, but they could have gone further down." 

János Molnár had already suggested opening up the natural treasure via the mountain, and in 1976 Dr. Hubert Kessler argued for the cave's use for medical purposes. Since the end of the 1950s, people suffering from respiratory diseases had been treated in Hungarian caves, and so the idea was born to build a room for 20 patients, connecting the unions' summer boarding blocks on the Rózsadomb with the passageway system, and a corridor through which the Lukács Baths could be accessed by guests regardless of the weather. Although the construction began, the idea did not materialise. 

The golden age of research

The exploration of the Mill Lake Cave revived in the 1960s, and in 1973 a major expedition led by István Plózer, a diver and cave explorer, was launched. One member of the team, Gábor Mozsáry, recalled the event in his work Deep in the Underground Waters. " Diving down, it's like being in a water tank. Beautiful, clear water and life everywhere. Fish, plants. We take photos in the lake, because it's a rare occasion. Mr. Lily, the tenant, feels like we're trampling his vegetable garden. He thinks we're tearing up the plants, but it's just the water churning up as we swim. Diving in the pond is wonderful, but what we've come for is yet to come. Under the archway at the corner of the lake, a dark crevice opens up, above and below the water you can see far. We swim into it one after the other. The crevice is narrow but passable."

To ensure safer diving, coloured ropes were tied in the passages, and bases were set up in two air-filled chambers to help detect further passages. 

As a result of the research, three hundred metres of the cave system was discovered.  

Eight kilometres of maze

The deepest parts of the cave, which has borne the name of János Molnár since 1977, reach up to ninety to one hundred metres, and its known passages are now eight kilometres long, but it is still not known exactly how much of the cave is still to be explored. In the 2000s, an artificial cut in the cave revealed the world's largest thermal water chamber, a twenty to twenty-five-metre high hall named after Hubert Kessler. This fundamentally changed the future possibilities for exploration of the cave by creating a surface base for divers, making dives more efficient. Today's research is not just about exploring the excavated sections, water flow and water quantity, but also about studying the wildlife in detail.