Szeged

Fulbright came through with another epic visit, finally matching us with a good fish soup I've been hearing so much about, the well-known university formerly attended by several people we know, and with Szeged's renowned paprika and szalami. Szeged.


The visit began with a visit to the bilingual high school, Deák Ferenc, where students seem so well acculturated to foreigners and the dream of travel, that we were of little interest. By way of contrast, I also discovered that the welcome and courtesy I receive every day from students at my own high school in Barcs is special. Students at DVK greet me in Hungarian and increasingly in English, with shy smiles and nods and attentive expression, and this is due me not simply because I am an adult in the hallways, as I realized in my invisible soujourn through the Szeged school, but because whether I know them or not, students in Barcs know me, tanár úr amerikai. I felt very appreciative of this in the hallways, where I expected to engage any teenager I met.


The school was impressive, though. Because it's a bilingual school and by law bilingual schools require native speakers, there is a revolving door of Fulbright teachers, and when that doesn't work, one of the Hungarians finds a Canadian to marry, or a Brit, rope him back. Students, meanwhile, have a relationship with a private boarding school in Massachussetts, where Hungarian students receive the American elite experience for three months at absolutely no expense to themselves in exchange for a few week home stay by American students that then come abroad. Students were knowledgeable and adult; and those Fulbright grantees unfamiliar with Hungarian students or the class pictures on school walls were shocked by how mature were the faces in the portraits (I think Americans go for cute faster than for elegant, and it translates visibly).


We next toured Szeged University's library. Its spacious atrium once housed a line of beautiful faux ecalyptus trees, we were told, but they collected dust and so sadly had to be discarded; while our tour of the library was thorough and proud, I never could shake the perverse response to the ecalyptus trees, embraced for their realism and condemned for their dust. Still, we saw some incredible old books -- and we not only saw them, we handled them freely, books over three hundred years old whose pages were soft as dandelion seeds and whose bindings and folds were various and loose.

The old books were terrific to see, but the walking tour of the city was a welcome relief after spending the morning behind the closed doors of the Academy. Our hotel was right on Széchenyi Square. Cross it and you run right into Town Hall, and its marvelous Zsolnay porcelain roof.

This weekend you'd also run straight into the silent protest of streetworkers demanding to know where all the capital expenses went.

Any direction brought us to another marvelous building. Below are pictures of the Reök Palace, a building that captures early and aggressive Art Deco aesthetic  through its curved lines, pastels, and flowers. It's pretty, and pretty strange, and better than Miami Beach, and easy to capture on film, so here it is.

One thing that surprised us on our walks was how empty the streets seemed to be. Perhaps all the students were in class, housed together in a crush in some other neighborhood entirely; but I was very aware of an emptiness when we arrived at perhaps the most historical of sites, the Dom Tér, or Cathedral Square. We were alone with maybe forty or fifty others in a desert of a plaza beneath a 12th century tower and an absolutely dominant Votive Church (which apparently includes an organ with 11,000 pipes).

We crept into the Church where a mass was in session and slid into doorways and onto pews and behind columns. I'm sure many of us were alert to the reactions of those seated, because we knew we had cameras around our necks and we felt very American in there, but we were hungry nevertheless. This was the first Cathedral our girls had seen or remembered, and we weren't going to miss the chance for something as fleeting as courtesy when mob rule said we could clambor in.

Later, Sophie and I had a talk about architecture and religion, and how the grand cathedrals and basilicas were intended to evoke the majesty of God and inspire humility and awe of the universe, and how some buildings took several generations to build. Sophie said it didn't really make her feel God, but it was definitely big in there, and beautiful.


When we left the building, it was hard not to notice all the strange, satanic images on the main threshold of the cathedral, intended, I suppose, to scare off sinners or sin. Here are just a couple.

We also saw a gorgeous synagogue now one of half a dozen I've seen from the outside in Hungary. And like most of the others, this one is used by almost no one. I was told there were perhaps 40 Jews in Szeged, and they don't practice in this cavernous building, which may well be falling into the interior disrepair met by most; and whereas a religious group in another country might take over the grand palaces of the defeated, perhaps communist rule thinned out religion so much that even the gorgeous temples of old can lie fallow. On the other hand, a website where I can see the interior for the first time suggests that someone is providing upkeep.

The fish soup in the evening was terrific. I will say this. If someone tells you to be careful because the peppers are spicy, you can still go ahead and put them on your bread or in your soup or pop them plain into your mouth as I had done; but do remember what is there on your fingers before you go scratching your eyes or poking your eye ducts. After just such an experience, I am fortunate in two ways: One, the fire burned out. Two, in the bathroom where I fled to hose down hands and face, I remembered to wash before I did anything else there.


On the way back to the hotel, Emily insisted on jumping poses. The residual pepper in me came in handy, as did Franky's camera.

Late that night, Kent and Franky returned to their room next door and failed to get their key to work. When the night manager and several others had the same response, they called the owner of the hotel, and soon, in the middle of the night, workmen came with their drills and machines and bit that door open.

At right, Amelia demonstrates that the key lock is gone, and Franky and Kent's room is open to the world.


We were still staying in a hotel where Bartók Béla once played. See the ballroom below and it gets easier to imagine.

Before we left, we bought paprika and more kürtőskalács, heard a Hungarian folk pop band, and had a terrific dinner with Margaret, Pat and their son James, about whom more will be said when I describe the trip the eight of us took to Serbia the next day.

In the meantime, here we are on the Tisza river, wishing you a jó reggelt, jó napot, jó estét or jó éjszakát!