Category: travel writing

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The Puszta: How Vast This World

How vast this world in which we move,
And thou, how small thou art, my dove!
But if thou didst belong to me,
The world I would not take for thee.

Thou art the sun, but I the night,
Full of deep gloom, deprived of light.
But should our hearts together meet,
A glorious dawn my life would greet.

Ah! look not on me, close thine eyes,
My soul beneath thy glances dies;
Yet, since thou can’st not love me, dear,
Let my bereft soul perish here.

In the poems of the Hungarian poet Petöfi Sandor, the immense flatness of the great Eastern European Steppe, the Puszta, is a place of breathing, of grandeur, beauty and freedom. A place both humbling and inspiring, instilling patriotic pride and devotion, but, at the same time, passionate love.

Petöfi wrote love poems to his wife Julia, rendering his love inseparable from his love for the steppe. He dedicated his life to the Magyar struggle for independence from the Austrian Empire, both in word and deed: he composed the National song and joined the Hungarian Revolutionary Army. He vanished on the battlefield at only 26.

 

I’ll be a tree, if you are its flower
Or a flower, if you are the dew
I’ll be the dew, if you are the sunbeam
Only to be united with you.

My little girl, if you are the heaven
I shall be a star above on high.
My little girl, if you are hell-fire,
To unite us, damned I shall die.

Petöfi’s body was never found. Some Hungarians believe that he resurrected, like a Messiah. Some say, that he never died, that he is only asleep, somewhere in the endless planes of the Puszta.

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Vienna: Cherubs

By daylight, walking through the center of Vienna feels like a journey into the glorious past of an empire: the palaces with their cheerful rococo facades, playgrounds for the little cherubs, cute little creatures, half angels, half cupids.


But wait for night fall, when the streetlights are turned off, and only the illuminated windows cast shadows on the deserted streets.

The cherubs are still playing in the dark, innocent.

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VIENNA: FIRE IN THE PALACE OF JUSTICE

90 years ago, in 1927, the Palace Of Justice, seat of the Supreme Court, was set on fire. Rightwing supporters of the Front Fighters’ Union, which counted later war criminal Adolf Eichmann among its members, clashed with members of the Schutzbund, the paramilitary organization of the social democratic party. The day before, a district court had unjustly acquitted members of the Front Fighters’ Union from shooting and killing two innocent bystanders, a 40 year old and a 8 year old, in another confrontation with the Schutzbund.

These were the days of the Civil War, which led the young Republic of Austria into its demise: Austria was swallowed by fascism, integrated into Hitler’s Third Reich and buried under ashes in the WWII.

84 people vanished in the fire. 60 millions in WWII and the holocaust.

In 2017 the Palace of Justice sparkles with gold again. Trust in law and justice seems undisturbed.
The eyes of Justitia are blind as she sits enthroned, holding on to her sword, and clutching a book.
What book is she reading, blindly?

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Istanbul: Lesson in Sufism

He serves tea. As he balances the tray with the bulbous tea glasses, he spills the tea. His left leg is shorter, arched like a sickle, so when he walks he sways like a boat on choppy sea. I notice his crooked left leg only now. His grey suit is a few sizes too big, crumpled, and wrinkles around his ankles. It looks even older than himself. Threadbare at the elbows and knees, it shrouds his body rather than dresses it. It blurs the details of his physique. As he sets the tray on the table in front of me, I smell tobacco and terpentine, and the dusty scent of old age. His hair is grey, his face wrinkled, his moustache white. But his lopsided smile is boyish, his blue eyes are fresh, sparkling almost. I cannot remember how to say “Thank you” in Turkish. So I bow and mumble “Moteshakkaram”.  I speak a little Persian and hope that people in Istanbul, or at least he, Avni, will understand me.

He takes a seat next to me on a shaky chair. It’s a jumbled ensemble of a table and three chairs. Maybe these are valuable antiques, were they restored. But they are splintered and skew like Avni’s leg, and spotted with colors from his atelier, his painter’s workshop in steep, cobbled Siraselviler Street. The sun is baking the city, but here, in front of Avni’s open workshop door, it’s shady and cool. A soft breeze tousles his hair as I feel strands of my hair lift off my head and dance in the air.

I gaze through the open door inside at the painting I want to buy. It’s just a tiny canvas, hardly bigger than a the tray he had carried the tea with, suspended high up on the wall. It is dwarfed by the big frames hanging next to it, or leaning against the wall below. The little painting could be just a coral white stain on an ocean-blue backdrop. Or it could be the shape of a dancing Dervish.

“Mavlana. “ Avni says.

“Mavlana!” I repeat and put my hand on my chest. Mavlana, the whirling Sufi poet. “I love.” Avni must have understood the word “love”, for he nods his head enthusiastically and starts reciting. I don’t understand Turkish, but it must be a poem by Rumi, the Master, Mavlana, as the Turkish call him.

It’s a rhythmic singsong that reflects the mountainous streets of Istanbul, this dizzying web of narrow lanes, uphill, downhill, jammed with cars and buses, crowded with bearded men, high heeled women, and children, with cats and dogs, and filled with laughter and calls for prayer, and with the scents of cumin, of Shisha, and of cat piss. I do not understand the words as Avni proclaims the poem, lifting his arms as if dancing in trance, as if painting on an imaginary canvas, but my heart is filled with peace, enriched. I don’t understand the words, but I understand Avni.  And as I look into his wild blue eyes, strangely, I know he understands me.