Ópusztaszer

If you wanted to have a picnic in the place where, in 895 A.D., the great Árpád finally settled (or retreated, according to current historiography -- "settled" in the other sense of the word), you couldn't do much better than the National Historical Memorial Park of Ópusztaszer. Fulbright brought us by coach one hour out of Szeged where we were free to roam amongt the sheep and statues, the wide open spaces and the space-age domes that cut the sky. Pack your own lunch, though, because the one snack bar open at the park heightened aggression among the guests, and most of us by then were ready for an old-style Hungarian raid to make do.

One of the big draws of the park is an enormous panorama painting created over two years at the tail end of the 19th century. Housed in the most dominant building for miles around, the painting tells the story of how Árpád came to the Carpathian basin, raided the land, enslaved the women, killed the men and boys, and enacted pagan rites through the slaughter of beautiful white mares. Follow the hyperlinks in this sentence to see images of Árpád, the reluctant sacrificial mare, and the Shaman who foretells their future through the death of the white beauty. I was thinking about this future: When Árpád and the others discovered that their destiny was a millenia of despair, defeat and failed revolutions, maybe they regretted losing the horse.

Surrounding the central Árpád memorial were the most interesting bronze busts of monarchs I'd ever seen. They weren't flattering, at least as far as I could tell. Kings of course were victims of long past fashions, with geometric beards and wire hanger moustaches; but the statues also captured this strange evolution of pride through the generations of kings. While I don't have most of the pictures here, please take my word for the fact that a series of Hungarian leaders start with their chins almost level and quickly lift to 45 degrees of aching-neck hautiness.

  

Please observe this king. While his chin is at rest in quite a normal position, his very skin seems to fold in on itself with contempt.



Then you have characters like this guy at right, about whom I need say very little.

We all noticed that the greatest of all Hungarian kings, István the First, looked positively exhausted with worry, though he was the only bust to have a gold crown and robe -- as the only king to be sainted, perhaps. He carries the burden of all Hungary in his worn face, but in the end succeeded in uniting the warring tribes and allying himself with both Pope and Emperor, and he was sainted in 1083.


Another piece of the history park was a rural village set in that last 200 years. When people heard about the school house and how it housed many grades in one room, and that there still exists one school house with only four children in it, several people asked us about the Szulok school my children attend: 23 kids, two multi-grade rooms. I don't find this archaic at all, even before arriving here. Stephanie reported that the girls attend a Montessori program in a public elementary school in Seattle where several grades are purposefully combined in a single classroom, where maturity, leadership and knowledge grow together.


I was more interested in some of the old posters they had around, like one about the danger of flies, portraying flies in food, flies around animal corpses, and flies attacking a baby. Below on the right is a detail from a poster warning of the dangers of drunkenness.

One of the funny things to me about this hundred year old museum village was the space-age dome that rises up in the background like cheap science fiction. The two pictures below capture the same image, but the one on the right zooms closer to the tented future at the center.

From there, Stephanie, Sophie, Amelia, Maisie and I climbed and studied an immaculate windmill and then looked for food.

After a harrowing experience at the snack bar, the kids went with Stephanie to work with felt, and I went on a walk with Kent and Emily.

The walk through the woods was beautiful, and we saw an enormous jackrabbit and what felt to be an even bigger wolf spider, who shocked us when it shrank in size and lightened in color, as all its black babies fled from its body in a fright. We also saw Oxen. Judge for yourself why I pair the two photos below.

Towards the end of our visit, we sat on log benches at the Park of the Nomads, where men and young women with arrows and spears and horses demonstrated the best tribe raiding skills I've ever seen, with mounted shooting, roping, and yelling techniques probably unfamiliar to the modern Hungarian.

The four second video below captures a young kid practicing before the exhibition. The poor resolution makes this video just about meaningless. Imagine an arrow getting lofted in full stride and smacking straight into its target.

After the museum staff demonstrated their remarkable prowess with spears, and also a game where they played keep-away with a bundle of skin surely meant to represent a baby, they then invited volunteers to join them for such games as mounted tug of war, and shoot the enemy in the head, which Amelia came close to doing.

We also had to contend with this renegade pony, who was ready to eat anything handy, like Andrea's purse, Emily's umbrella, or whatever is at the bottom of this garbage can. I won't say whether Emily, in the picture at right, is admonishing the pony or assisting it, but perhaps she is to be commended either way.