Righteous, Rock-hard Pecs

In between the hasty departure of the Romans in the 5th century and the leisurely arrival of the Magyars in the 9th, not a whole lot happened in Pécs. Or maybe it did; I could look it up, but then I'm already a day late getting to this post. Let's face it: people don't come here for rigorous, comprehensive history. They come here for lame puns, sweeping generalizations, and vaguely offensive jokes. Whether the offense is due to the content or the quality of the jokes is not for me to judge.

Anyway, the Magyars swaggered onto the scene after a 350-year horseback mosey from somewhere east of the Urals; based on linguistics, they got into an argument at some point with the Finns (perhaps about how to split the enormous tab for alfalfa) and parted ways in a huff. Arriving in Hungary, they surveyed the land, noted the lack of any distinguishing topographical features, and thought, "perfect." From an equestrian's standpoint this makes sense, and like all pastoral nomads who eventually meet the right girl and settle down, they found that the Carpathian basin was also ideally suited for farming. This allowed Hungary to flourish while much of Western Europe struggled, and to weather some of the nastier famines with an abundant food surplus.

With the establishment of the kingdom came the establishment of Christianity as the official religion, and the Magyarized version of Pécs developed around the cathedral, built on the ruins of the Roman cemetery. In fact, the Cella Septichora was possibly repurposed for that role, but a fire in the 11th century necessitated the construction of a new building. The current cathedral is a 19th-century Neo-Romanesque version of the four-tower structure that was established by the 15th century. The museum of the medieval university has some handy reconstruction pictures, hopefully visible despite the blurriness:

What you will notice from the pictures above is the development of a system of walls around the cathedral complex, and this happened for good reason. The Mongols paid a visit around 1240, and believe me, they weren't sending their best; they were sending rapists, murderers, and very few of them, I imagine, were good people. So the bishop built a wall, and the Mongols paid for it! Just kidding; that would be ridiculous.

Speaking of the university museum, I was at first excited to be studying at Hungary's oldest university, established in 1367. Imagine my disappointment, then, when I learned that the university went defunct just a few decades later, and was only reestablished when the University of Pozsony relocated here after WWI; Pozsony was renamed Bratislava and became part of newly-formed Czechoslovakia (and now capital of Slovakia). What a rip-off! I demand remission of my tuition payment.

The medieval university museum has all sorts of great information on the early period, but the consensus seems to be that most people reading this would rather I cut to the chase and share embarrassing stories about me being humiliated in different situations, so suffice to say the double wall still remains around the old city. What was once intended as an area to grill Mongolians with boiling oil, is now a favorite haunt of micturating vagrants and canoodling teens, with the two groups often in uncomfortably close proximity to one another. I'll just share one photo of a particularly impressive barbican, located near the cathedral:

Micturating vagrants and canoodling teens not shown

Ok, onto lighter subject matter, at least for the reader. The Magyars brought with them to this land a weapon so powerful it is not encountered anywhere else on earth: their language. I've now been studying Hungarian for several months and have a vocabulary equivalent to Ivan Drago's in Rocky IV, except I don't know how to say "you will lose" or "if he dies, he dies." On the first day of class our teacher attempted to assuage our fears of this notoriously difficult language by pointing out the following positives:

1. Hungarian is remarkably pure, largely unchanged for the past millennium, so the rules of pronunciation are fixed and consistent

2. The verb form can do double duty as the subject, so "Andrew am" and other caveman talk is perfectly acceptable, even encouraged! Food want. Goulash good. And so on.

3. Word order is largely irrelevant. Ok, there are some conventions, but they are nowhere near as defined as in other languages; must make dubbing/subtitling Yoda a major challenge.

4. There is no gender in Hungarian (how progressive!), which must be why my landlord keeps referring to me as "it, the American cretin."

5. There are basically only two tenses, past and present.

6. Loaner words! Auto, csokolade, elefant, gitar, mobiltelefon, and szalami are all permissible...though maybe not all in the same sentence (bonus points to whoever can get them all in one).

Let me now proceed to demolish these laughable claims one by one:

1. Sure, pronunciation is fixed, but it's also bloody impossible. Hungarian vowels never met a diacritic they didn't like, and looking at a page of the language suggests a typesetter collapsed on the job. Virtually every word is festooned with accents, umlauts, and an elongated super-umlaut that's actually called the Hungarumlaut (I'm not making this up).

 

These are the only band names pronounceable in Hungarian

Once a Hungarian is done violating the vowels, it's time to cross-breed the consonants. One of those loaner words is "jeep," only it's not spelled that way; it's spelled "dzsip." Of course it is. "Ly" is "yuh," "Ny" is "nyuh," and I'm still not sure what to do with "ty."

2. Sure, leaving off the subject saves some time, but remembering the verb endings is, for me at least, nigh on impossible. Is it -unk or -ünk? -tek or -tok? It also doesn't help that they all look and sound awfully similar.

3. Word order does, in fact, matter. It's apparently all about the "focus point," and that's where you have to put the right word or the whole sentence falls apart. Failure to do so can result in dire consequences; you might go into a tobacconists' to make a simple purchase and say the following:

Worse is the case scenario (worst case case scenario?) in Hungarian: there are 18 of them. One Eight. This means words are constantly getting suffixes appended to them depending on whether you're for, into, in, from, to, at, on, about, with, for, until, turning into, or as something. These are known variously as illative, inessive, allative, adessive, and so on. I'm particularly looking forward to the supressive and the terminative, and yes, these are all the real terms.

4. Sure, not worrying about gender would seem to simplify things, and is the opposite of the situation in German, as lampooned by Mark Twain. Still, I can imagine it leading to confusion:

Coach Gabor: Ok team, we're down by a goal but there's still time to turn this thing around; I won't have the coed intramural soccer title taken away from me. Here's the plan: Eszter, you pass the ball to Zoltan. Zoltan, pass the ball to Aniko. Aniko, pass the ball back to Eszter. Eszter, kick the ball to Istvan who will score the goal. Now somebody repeat that back to me.
Aniko: It passes it to it, it passes it to me, I pass it back to it, it passes it to it, and it scores the goal.
Coach: Exactly.

5. So basically Hungarians are either stuck in the past or living in the present; they have no future. Does that sound like an ideal situation?

Hungary: Where then will soon be now.

6. I'm pretty sure all the loaner words were on page three of the textbook, because I encounter one every three days or so. I went to the opera tonight and here's what I picked up from the supertitles:

something something IT something something THE something something WHAT ARE YOU DOING?! something something something GOOD NIGHT.

Why doesn't anybody ever order a "szendvics" or ask to see the bus schedule in an opera? Work with me here, people.

To sum up, I'm unlikely to become fluent in Hungarian anytime soon. Luckily, enough people speak English or German that I'm able to get by well enough. Particularly entertaining is my chamber music lessons: the violinist and teacher speak German with me, the cellist and I speak English, and they all speak Hungarian with one another. Somehow it works.

Next month I'll look at the period of the Ottoman invasion, and think of some amusing stories wherein I perturb the locals; shouldn't be too difficult.