Trip to Hungary

Stefan Batory, King of Poland 1576-1586, but a Hungarian by birth

Polak, Węgier — dwa bratanki,
i do szabli, i do szklanki

- Poles and Hungarians are brothers,
with both sabers and shot-glasses

Lengyel, magyar — két jó barát,
együtt harcol s issza borát.

- A Pole, a Hungarian, good friends
fight and drink wine together

As the United States so amply demonstrates, any major world power is going to have a lot of people hating its guts. Poland, having been a major power in Eastern Europe, combined with the fact that Poland keeps getting invaded by Germans and Russians, doesn't really feel a lot of love from the neighbors. Heck, from what I understand even the Lithuanians aren't big fans of Poland, partly as the dual monarchy increasingly became the POLISH-Lithuanian Commonwealth as time went on. Like a pop song, Eastern Europe sometimes has me questioning, where is the love?

Well, there's an answer for that: Poland-Hungary. Interestingly enough, they were once part (or in Poland's case, part of it was part) of the same country for quite some time.

Then this happened

  The good feelings between the two countries appear to be very much mutual and very deeply rooted, as I saw on my recent tour of Hungary with the members of "Cantata", The Academic Choir of the Politechnika Krakowska. Indeed, the Hungarians helped the Poles during World War II, taking in a lot of Polish refugees and allowing them to live more or less normal lives despite the fact that Hungary was fighting on what our tour guide euphemistically referred to as "the other side" during World War II. In a museum, I saw a Polish language paper that was 1) well-printed and 2) reporting the death of Reinhard Heydrich, a.k.a. a Nazi so brutal and devoted it kind of creeped Hitler out, as a lead and very welcome story, two things that could never have happened together in Poland at the time. The Nazis weren't happy that Poles were taking refuge in Hungary, but apparently Admiral Horthy basically told Hitler to go peddle his watercolors. The Poles returned the favor by not taking part in the Warsaw Pact's invasion of Hungary in 1956, though in fairness the PRL government had a lot of problems close to home, like an uprising in Poznań. But still, they probably could have spared a few tanks if they had really wanted to.

Władysław Gomułka always kept some spare tanks lying around, just in case.

We spent the bulk of our tour around the shores of Lake Balaton, which is apparently the largest lake in Europe but actually quite shallow. We were hosted by the choir "VOX", in the town of Balatonboglar. And they took that hosting responsibility very seriously. I don't know how this trip was financed exactly, but all I know is I paid 150 złoty (about 50 bucks) for a five-day tour during which transportation, accommodation and meals were covered, and we had all of our dinners with VOX at places of their choosing, including one where the owner (and, as we found out, mayor of a neighboring town) was a tenor in the group. The surrounding area is good wine country, partly the result of ancient volcanic activity that left the northern edge of the lake looking oddly like The Lord of the Rings could have been filmed there. We had a chance to sample a considerable amount of said wine (all of it homemade), along with Palinka (also homemade), a fruit spirit with a taste somewhere between slivovitz and straight vodka. It was of course rather popular among our crowd, and I joked about starting a "Ruch Palinkota" back in Poland. 

Of course, having lengthy discussions with the members of the other choir was another matter entirely: nobody in our choir spoke Hungarian, and while we had an interpreter with us as well as a Polish woman who'd lived in Hungary for over 30 years as our guides, there were only two of them and 40 of us. Oddly, the attitude Poles have to the Hungarian language is an almost exact parallel to how Americans think about the Polish language, namely, "uh, how do you even pronounce it?" A few of us were able to have pleasant conversations with a Frenchman living in town in French, and German or Russian were generally the best bets to go with. Unfortunately, I don't know any of those languages ("ein bier, bitte" is about the extent of my German), so I was reduced to the few words of English anybody knew and wild gesticulations. This amused some of our choristers to no end, with one saying that despite the fact very little communication was going on, he'd never seen two people so engrossed in conversation as I was with an older gentleman, whose name is Imre.

Despite the language barrier, the climate was very warm and welcoming. We sang a few of our songs, they sang a few of theirs, there were a couple that we all knew so we sang together. And I even got to solo a couple of times on "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot!" And unless you count two persons who shall remain nameless (and genderless, though you can probably guess) who were drunkenly mulling over tying bedsheets together to sneak out of our hostel through the window after curfew, there were no particularly outrageous shenanigans I could see.

We sang two concerts and a mass on this trip, one concert in Balatonboglar together with VOX and a mass followed by a concert at the Polish parish church in Budapest. It's nice to sing in a mixed choir again, something I haven't done since high school and which I've missed for some time. I've been rather surprised at the amount of music our choir learns in a short span of time, and a few of those pieces hadn't been extensively rehearsed beforehand. However, I think both concerts went quite well and I have now sung my first piece in Hungarian.

Balatonboglar is a cute town of about 3,000 inhabitants and apparently hosts a horse race every year. We got to see guys driving two-horse hunting buggies through an obstacle course featuring a series of very sharp turns. The combination of traditional dress and traffic cones with tennis balls on top of them was a sight to see. We took a day trip to Keszthely to see some palace or another, inhabited by some seriously rich dudes who seriously built 103 rooms over a span of 200 years and 8 generations. The carriage house, currently a museum of carriages, is itself the size of about 2 American single-family homes, and American families don't stint on their housing space either. You're looking at a palace where the garage would be a nice place to live in. We had to put on slippers over our shoes before visiting the palace, as the floors were all wood parquet. The tour started to get boring after a while, as all the furnishings and portraits and Chinese vases and Italian furniture and French clocks and French vases and Chinese furniture and Italian clocks started to blend together. Though I risk my status as a card-carrying Republican saying it, I got a very visceral understanding of the appeal of socialism just by looking at that place.    

Budapest is continuing to be a tease. This was my second time in the city, but neither time could I claim to have really "seen" it. The first time was several years ago, driving to the Balkans and getting lost in Budapest in the rain. The second time (this one), we had four hours in the city. Our guide decided the best thing to do with those four hours was to show us all of the major sights at breakneck pace, including the most elaborate entrance to a swimming pool I have ever seen, with heavy Byzantine motifs celebrating washing one's hair. We also saw a Basilica, Parliament (from a distance), the Presidential Palace, and a subway station. We did see both Buda and Pest, and if I understood our guide correctly, Budapest is actually a city run on a federal system: each District governs itself. I wonder what happens if one of the decides to secede?

Pictured: Mayor of the XXI District

In other political news, I've heard that Hungary is unfortunately slipping down a semi-fascist path. Now, I didn't test this personally by standing in front of Parliament yelling "Viktor Orban is a schnook" and seeing what happened.

I doubt he would have been amused

Anyway, one of our singers asked one of the Hungarians about politics, and they said that things are gradually deteriorating to the point where if you're going to complain about the government, it's best to do it quietly or not at all. The EU has been worried about Hungary for quite some time, as the government has cracked down on press freedoms. The government itself is worried about the rise of a neo-Nazi party, Jobbik, which like all extremist groups does well when times are bad. It is all very unfortunate and I hope that both hard and softcore totalitarianism are just passing fads.

I had a wonderful time in Hungary, our hosts were fantastic and we had a chance to see a number of sights. I think I'd like to go back to Budapest, the question is now, how to find the time?