March to Barcs: Subotica, Serbia

Remember these names?

Slobodan Milosevic. Butcher of the Balkans kicked out ten years ago today.
Radovan Karadžić. Very bad psychiatrist.
Ratko Mladic. Bosnian Serb nationalist killer General hero.

One is dead, one shaved off a beard to stand trial at the Hague, and one remains on Interpol's most wanted list.

It was hard not to think of headlines and books we read less than a dozen years ago about Serbia, about a politics and systematic brutality I never thought I'd see in my own lifetime but we saw twice in the same decade, in former-Yugoslavia, in Africa, and then more recently in Africa again.

I certainly never thought I'd be a tourist la la la-ing into the Balkans. But a big, beautiful town in Serbia is only an hour from Szeged, and our friends from Pécs were going to head south on their way back, and we were happy to join them.

Pat O'Connor and Margaret McMullan are a lively, vibrant couple, and both are writers (Margaret's books are linked here). They are so easy to be with and talk to, and Margaret laughs so fully and so often, that we feel we too are good and welcome company. Their son is an old soul at his ease with adults, and admirable not just as a young teenager, but as a human being.

They are in Pécs on Margaret's Fulbright scholarship, as she spends the Fall semester researching and writing about a Jewish grandfather and some of what happened to Jews in Pécs during the Second World War.

I've started thinking more about Jews in Hungary, in part because of the first conversation I had with Margaret during the Budapest meeting. But I've also been thinking about them because of a Jewish cemetery here in Barcs, though I haven't been past the locked gate yet, and a picture of a beautiful old synagogue (below, left) that now is half as high and twice dilapidated, most recently as a decommissioned furniture store. Furthermore, student dorms for Forestry students at my high school is the former hunting lodge, or castle, of Széchényi Ferenc, the grandson of a great Count, and this was said to be owned by prominent Jews of Barcs. But after World War II, not a one Jew is left. I find myself very alert to the question mark that remains.

I am very close to history here. But this was not the only reason I was thrumming with thoughts of travel to Serbia. As Pat and Margaret talking about going to Subotica, Stephanie somehow pulled out the fact that this town is where the novel, Skylark, is based.

Skylark, by Dezso Kosztolányi, is the first Hungarian book I enjoyed, as you might see in one of my earliest posts. This is the book where an older man and woman rediscover a joyous life when their ugly but devoted daughter leaves their home to visit cousins for a week. Margaret, Stephanie, and I had this book in common, and the joy and light humor affected us each: we loved the idea of walking the streets Skylark's father drunkenly, delightedly walked. We accepted the trip as a mission we wouldn't turn down.

We interacted very little with people and spent hardly any time there, so have only the barest of observations: that buildings were marvelous and in surprising disrepair, that Hungarian was still spoken by many like a bum by the bank, that open air vendors hawk books and not watches, that the world is unendingly wondrous once more.

Below is the Great Church, 230 years old and prominently cracked.

Nearby is an empty synagogue, just over 100 years old and topped by what looks like a Zsolnay porcelain roof. It is a broken old dog.

The Town Hall was so big! And it was lovely, too. Inside was one of the prettiest McDonald's I had ever seen (and thank you, McDonald's, for having the most accessible bathrooms in the world).