Sculpted, Defined Pecs

I have decided to end my historical survey of Pécs around 1900, focusing on the beautiful ceramic tiles of the Zsolnay Porcelain Factory. There’s not much to discuss after this time; defeat in World War One led to an economic downturn, World War Two largely passed Pécs by (though apparently a large tank battle was fought with the Soviets in the region...Hungary lost, naturally), and Communism left behind a multitude of nondescript concrete and steel housing blocks, about which the less said the better.

 

Zsolnay refers to Miklós Zsolnay (1800-1880) and more importantly his son Vilmos (1828-1900), who established a porcelain and ceramics factory in Pécs that now—conveniently for me—serves as the campus of the Faculty of Music and Arts. The Zsolnays pioneered methods of firing tiles at a high heat that rendered them largely porous and weather-resistant (called pyrogranite), leading to their widespread use throughout the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Visit Budapest and you will see Zsolnay tiles adorning the halls of Parliament, the roof of the Matthias Church, and many other historic sites. They also developed an iridescent glaze known as eosin, which was eagerly employed by many Art Nouveau artists.

Zsolnay tiles atop the Pécs Post Office

In Pécs most of the following pictures are taken from the factory complex that I walked through every day; the Zsolnays were ahead of their time, cultivating an appealing workplace environment comparable to the campuses of Google or Apple, only with fewer nerds and espresso machines. They cleverly cast extra copies of statues designed for various buildings, and used these to decorate the grounds, something almost unheard of in the Gilded Age of employee exploitation. All this beauty no doubt helped to inspire me, though not as much as Bela's frequent chastisements.

Kiln in the style of a Moorish minaret

Former home of the Zsolnay family in the middle of the factory, now a museum



Entrance to the Zsolnay family mausoleum, flanked by dozens of mourning lions.

Mausoleum.

Roof of mausoleum interior, decorated with tile angels.

Art Nouveau Sarcophagus of Vilmos Zsolnay.

Mausoleum interior.

Beautiful Zsolnay fountain in the main city square.

Detail of fountain, showing mythical Magyar beast created using eosin technique.

I essentially attended school at Hogwarts.

As my time in the land of the Magyars winds to a close, I thought I would devote the bulk of this post to some reflections on the pros and cons of living in Pécs specifically, and Hungary and Central Europe generally. These are grouped as rants and raves, or as I will call them, Mohacses (after the greatest Hungarian defeat) and Matthiases (after the greatest Hungarian king).

 

Mohacs: Glumgarians

 

You may recall I had some rather uncharitable things to say about the Magyars in my first post, and two years later much of my initial assessment still holds true. Despite my feeble efforts to learn their incomprehensible language (see below), my interactions with the locals are all too often strained, cold, and opaque; great qualities when selecting your yogurt, less desirable in social exchanges. Many Magyars just don’t seem to take too kindly to foreigners, even ones as delightful as I imagine myself to be. Service at restaurants is typically of the “frisbee” variety, as a friend describes it; the default mode of interaction on the street is a dead, reptilian stare; and smiles are as rare as ice cubes and air conditioning. Mind you, these qualities are equally present in neighboring countries, but—no doubt due to linguistic and cultural isolation—the Magyar society is a particularly closed one. Consider a recent exchange I managed to have in my halting Hungarian while attempting to order a taxi over the phone:

 

Me: Good evening. Do you speak English or German?

Magyar: No….I'm Hungarian.

Me: Yes; thank you.

 

Matthias: Fungarians!

 

Thankfully, I have been fortunate enough to meet and befriend Hungarians that are capable of smiling, cracking jokes, and human warmth, even if their humor is of the darker variety. My landlord, neighbors, and several classmates have all been great company, and able to poke fun at their national pessimism. They have been endlessly patient with my general cluelessness, and I am hoping some of them will be able to visit me in America in the future.

 

Mohacs: Magyarul

 

I needn’t reprise my diatribe against the Hungarian language, but two years and dozens of hours of classes later, I still don’t really know what anyone is saying. Interestingly, just before I left I was starting to feel more hopeful about the language--I can understand about ten percent of a given conversation, and a Dutch friend of mine has miraculously achieved near-fluency--but I now realize I would need at least two more years to start getting comfortable using a language with zero utility elsewhere in the world.

Matthias: Németul

Luckily, German (Németul to the Magyars) has stood me in good stead when English wasn't an option; most educated Hungarians speak at least one of the two. I'm far from fluent but then they aren't either, and we manage to make it work provided there aren't any native speakers around to correct us with Teutonic pedantry.

Matthias: Austrian trains

I will miss the ease with which one can get around by train in Europe. Particularly cushy were the Austrian trains, especially when I occasionally splurged on first class; plush leather seats that recline, food and beverage service, and all the modern amenities. From Vienna you can reach Budapest in under three hours, Prague in under four, and Munich in under five.

Mohacs: Hungarian trains

...are another story. What should be a two hour journey from Pécs to Budapest ends up being three, with long stretches of track in which it would be faster to get out and walk (I'm surprised I was never asked to help push). The only discernible difference between first and second class is the presence of power outlets in the former, and the toilets are the old-fashioned ones that give you an exhilarating view of the tracks as they whiz (poor choice of words?) by. Particularly egregious in the last few months was the need to take a bus for part of the journey, since there is currently track work between the two cities.

Matthias: Architecture 5^th century to 1950

As this blog has made clear, I am a big fan of the many beautiful buildings I have been able to enjoy during my time here. I was also fortunate to take art history classes with an excellent teacher, who helped me better appreciate the differences in various architectural styles. I now finally know enough to obnoxiously correct my colleagues, which always goes over well.

Mohacs: Architecture 1950 to present

Call me old-fashioned, but I simply can't warm to the gray, rectangular concrete monstrosities that blight the landscape of Pécs and many other Central European cities. My art history prof did help me appreciate some of the modernist architecture of the early 20th century (Mies van der Rohe et al) and my neighbor was an architect working on an interesting theater project, but my tastes run more to the Renaissance and Baroque. If I can't imagine myself wandering the grounds in a powdered wig (without being arrested, that is), I don't want to be there.

Mohacs: Restaurants in Pécs and Vienna

Ah Pécs, so lovely in so many ways, but fine dining is not one of them. There are a handful of decent places (the kebab place, the pizza place, strangely enough the Mexican place), but more often than not my experiences eating out ranged from mediocre to revolting. A tip that is common sense and requires no further elaboration: sushi in medium-sized Central European cities is best avoided.

The situation in Vienna is different, which makes the mediocrity of restaurants there all the more inexcusable. I can understand how restaurants in the remote reaches of Hungary suffer in quality; I can't understand how the same can be true in what is supposedly the most livable city on earth. In Vienna what rankles me most is the obscene markup and the even more obscene behavior of the staff. I have had waiters openly ignore me, insult my dining companions, and generally conform to every negative stereotype of the Viennese as cold and supercilious. Even on the few occasions when I splurged on a high-end restaurant the experience was unbearably stuffy. I remember one automaton waiter saying after serving every course, and I'm not exaggerating: "It's an amusing little dish; have fun with it." What did he have in mind? Do I want to know?*

Matthias: Restaurants in Budapest and Prague

Thank goodness for Budapest and Prague, two cities with plenty of great options for food of every type and price. Both cities have embraced the entrepreneurial spirit and are big enough to offer at least one great restaurant of every type, including sushi (not from the Danube...I think). Prices are generally reasonable, service is usually very good, and the experience doesn't leave one a quivering, nauseous blob in the bathroom corner.

Mohacs: Hungarian choir

I reserve my final Mohacs for an experience I have avoided discussing so far, for fear that it would trigger traumatic memories requiring extensive counseling. For the past two years I have been the lone non-Magyar member of the University of Pécs' award-losing student choir. In a cruel twist of fate the dean of the school happens to be the director of the choir, meaning that he has a limitless supply of slave labor to help fulfill his infernal musical aspirations. At first I had high hopes: the dean was disarmingly kind to me in his halting English (I was something of a curiosity), the music was beautiful (lots of Kodaly and other great choral composers), and we only met twice a week.

How wrong I was. What I didn't realize was the existence of so-called "choir weeks," which are exactly what they sound like: 24 hours a day, seven days a week, nothin' but choir. Ok, more like 5 hours a day, 5 days a week, but bad enough. Worse still, these weeks were always in preparation for some much-vaunted trip to China in which I never took part, necessitating the singing of such crowd-pleasing dreck as Glenn Miller's "In the Mood," Michael Jackson medleys (including some pretty anti-Semitic lyrics), and various forms of Classics Lite. My frequent absences from such events soon soured the dean's opinion of me, leading to some very awkward exchanges in the halls. Oops.

Matthias: Hungarian piano teachers

Of course I have to conclude by focusing on my impetus for coming to Hungary in the first place; the desire to soak up firsthand pianistic knowledge from the land of Liszt, and here the Hungarians did not disappoint. Some of you have picked up on the Freudian/Jungian implications of my piano lessons with Béla, and indeed each lesson did feel like we were enacting some father/son, master/apprentice conflict from antiquity. Did I view myself as a piano demigod constantly trying to measure up to my Zeus-like father? Did I want to murder Béla and marry his wife, who is in fact my mother? The answer to both questions is, of course, yes.

Speaking seriously, it has been a privilege to work so closely with someone who understands the music of Liszt, and music in general, so profoundly. Having studied music academically for many years, it has been humbling to realize how much hands-on knowledge I had, and have, yet to acquire. Though they will never read this, I would like to thank Béla and the many other excellent teachers I encountered during my two years here. A touching moment came after my diploma concert, which went better than anyone could have anticipated: Béla shook my hand and said with great solemnity, "you are no longer my student; you are now a colleague."


Not much can be said after that. This concludes my first and most likely last foray into the world of blogging; hopefully reading these sporadic installments has been edifying or at least entertaining. I look forward to sharing more stories about life among the Magyars in person, and wish you all an egészséges, pihentető summer. Viszontlátásra!

*My recent experience in Salzburg shows that insufferable Austrian waiters are not confined to the capital. My friends and I visited a restaurant with the most unpleasant wait staff I have ever seen. My attempts to speak German to them, far from establishing rapprochement, made matters worse; the only thing an Austrian hates more than hearing English is hearing High German. I politely asked the waiter for horseradish or "Meerettich." He stared at me, uncomprehendingly, and finally answered with a contemptuous, "Ach so....KREN!" We left a very small tip.