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| Eger Castle Wall, seen from the main entry |
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| Eger Castle, as seen from Dobó Ter Two weeks gone, vanished. So much has taken place in that period of time, our heads are fairly spinning. Kathie and Harry arrived in Budapest the December 18th. Admirably, they hit the ground running and we happily joined in. In the days heading up to Christmas, we all ventured further out of Budapest than we had previously been. In a compact but comfortable rental Mercedes-Benz, we drove into the foothills of the Mátra Mountains, northeastern Hungary, just south of the Ukrainian border. Wine country was our destination, specifically the towns of Eger and Monok. EGER AND ITS STARS  MESS NOT WITH MOTIVATED MAGYARS Eger. She is a very old, Stone Age city. Her castle is built upon the ruins of an ancient Hun fortress, which would prove to be fortunate for the Magyars later on down the line. Once upon a time, during the Ottoman Wars of the 16th century, the Eger Castle was under siege by tens of thousands of Turks. Suleiman the Magnificent was continuing his expansion of the Ottoman empire, progressing ever westward, in hopes of reaching Vienna. Buda had fallen to the Turks, despite powerful resistance, and would eventually become the seat of Ottoman rule in Northern Hungary. Eger was a strategically important stronghold which protected the cushy but wealthy city of Kassa (now in Slovakia). If the fortress in Eger were to fall to the Turks, the Empire would have at its disposal a logistic advantage, allow it to lay siege in Vienna more often, and aid in its quest for expansion further into Europe. The Turks were tired. They had been battling hardscrabble Magyar forces for quite some time now, laying siege and capturing city by Christian city. Exhausting work, especially on foot. They reached Eger with 80,000 military personnel, cannons, trench guns, and mining equipment (for tunneling underneath the fortress). The Magyars were down but not out....about 2,000 of them were holding fast within Eger castle, 1500 of which were trained mercenaries, the remainder made up of peasants and newly widowed women. The Turks, weary but confident of an easy takeover, had not considered any twists of fate or the confounded resourcefulness of the remaining Magyars. They were certain they would finally taste victory, despite the fact that their attempts at tunneling underneath the castle were met with extreme frustration as they kept bumping into the foundation of the more ancient structure. They knew nothing of Captain István Dobó's brilliant efficiency with the few German weapons and Austrian musketeers he had at his disposal. They were blissfully unaware of young Gergely Bornemissza and his creativity with explosives...the officer created a rolling disk of death when he packed an errant water wheel with gunpowder, oil, sulfur, and flint. He sent this giant, merry bomb careening toward the Turks, and as the gunpowder exploded, it emitted lethal projectiles and instead of exploding and burning out, created even more fires and explosions in the wake of its deadly path. Thirty-nine days later with a third of their forces gone, the Turks turned tail and withdrew. The story of the Siege of Eger is a source of national pride (rightfully so) for Hungary, and almost any Hungarian can repeat the tale. The journalist Géza Gardonyi retold the drama in his 1899 novel Egri Csillagok, The Stars of Eger, which is required reading under the national Hungarian curriculum. The version I received was offered by my teenaged student, Bence Cselenyi, aspiring architect/prime minister. The humble little minaret below is all that remains of the Turks, aside from some eternally beneficial landmarks like thermal baths In this photo, you can't see the cross that sits triumphantly atop the spire.  WAY DOWN BELOW, WINE FLOWS  Basilicas, basilicas, everywhere. Churches by the dozen, plenty of places to pray. I must say that I am becoming comfortably numb to the grandeur and gravitas of Hungary's holy interiors but maintain a healthy respect for their beauty and purpose. Eger's Classicist basilica is as imposing as any in Hungary, but what lies beneath is more fascinating to me. Back in the day, the coffers of the Catholic Church in the parish of Eger were unacceptably empty. Mandatory tithes were few and far between since very few crops were viable in the foothills of the Mátras. In their stead, the church demanded wine from the grapes that happily flourished in these hills. The faithful supplied the juice, the friars completed the process and stored the results in a labyrinthine cellar hollowed out beneath the basilica. Problem solved, everyone would go to heaven now. The labyrinth is now a spooky, dank tourist attraction. One thousand forint buys you an excellent guided tour given by a man who claims not to speak English but does a convincing fascimile of such.  labyrinthine ghost  tree roots growing into the cellar  |
THE VALLEY OF THE BEAUTIFUL WOMEN
(SZÉPASSZONYVÖLGY)
wineries in the valley below Eger
Back to the Egri Csillagok....the real stars of Eger these days are the wineries. Eger is where the sort of famous Bull's Blood red originates. A blend of grapes such as Kékfrancos, Cabernet Franc, Cabernet Sauvignon or any of ten other varieties, "Bull's Blood" is a nomenclature tied to the Siege of Eger. Turkish soldiers decided the wine must be mixed with bull's blood....this explained the fortitude of the townspeople and their viciously stubborn success at keeping the Turks at bay.
Boone at Kis (keesh) Winery
The vineyards in Szépasszonzvölgy were a fairly short, dreamy, half-hour stroll from the Offi Hotel, our home base at Dóbo Ter. The weather, however, was forbidding, in that one or two of us (me, in my snazzy but impractical motorcyle boots) were not properly shod for the walk, whose route was uphill, slushy and icy. This route, over the cobblestone streets of a hilly neighborhood, would be breathtaking and a piece of cake, really, any season. We opted for a five minute cab ride, a thousand forint, about five bucks.
We did not spend too much time in Szépasszonzvölgy...time enough for two wineries. We have forgotten the name of the first winery, preferring much more the second, Kis. I had a couple of sips of the good stuff...the risk of gnarly headaches kept me from imbibing with too much adandon. Boone, however, was in his element.
Eger will be hearing from us again this spring. No need for taxis then. I'm bringin' my walking shoes and treading all over that town. I'll be walking the castle wall again, maybe squeezing into the minaret, but avoiding the churches. I've had my fill of vast, chilly, holy spaces that smell of frankincense. Eger is outside and that is where I will want to be.
SMALL TOWN, BIG SURPRISES
Monok coat of arms
The Tokaj region of Hungary is dotted with cute, sleepy little towns snoozing within the foothills. Nestled between the two hills which comprise the Zemplén Mountains lies Monok, birthplace of two inspirational Hungarian leaders. Kossuth Lajos was a talented and outspoken journalist, an early advocate of democracy in his country who enthusiastically and effectively railed against the Hapsburgs and their rule. He served as regent president in the mid-nineteenth century and his name can be found on the street signs in almost every Hungarian town of any size. Néméth Miklós was prime minister during the communist years in Hungary. He made the controversial descision to allow East Germans use Hungary as an indirect route into West Germany. His actions are credited with helping bring down the Berlin Wall in 1989.
More relevantly, however, Monok was the home to two young people, Bodnar Katherine and Apjok Janós. These were Kathie Nicholson's grandparents, and we travelled to Monok, on our way to Erdobenye, to see if there was anything we could find out about them.
Their story is both familiar and mysterious. Katherine left Hungary at the age of sixteen never to return. Perhaps she prepared herself in some way for this fact, perhaps she was simply shell-shocked by her experiences for a while. In keeping with the national ethos, she probably just did what she felt she had to do despite any emotional hardship.
Janós left his friends and family behind as well. That much was known. But a rift between the two, thrown together into an arranged marriage that produced five children, would leave their American desendants forever knowing very little about him.
"HE WAS A LITTLE MAN"
Katherine never loved Janós. After brief stays in the lush, green states of New Jersey and Kentucky, her husband's sprawling, homestead was less than attractive to her, and understandably so. Sundance, Wyoming, sits upon a stark and unforgiving landscape, particularly in the dead of winter. The basalt pillar, Devil's Tower, rises like a cropped shark's fin out of the rocky high desert. Certainly she thought back to the rolling, green hills and vineyards if her hometown every time she and her children squeezed into the sod house in which the family eked out their bleak existence. Kathie said, "They all but starved to death."
Janós was a diminuitive man. Too small to earn the big bucks down in the belly of the nearby coal mine in Cambria, he worked for very little in the tipple. Here, the men sorted and cleaned the coal that came up from below.
This lack of income was getting very tiresome for Katherine, who was raising their five children on a veritable pittance. Eventually the family moved into a company owned house, where they had to take in lodgers to make ends meet.
THE LODGER
Katherine may have felt numbed by her plight, her emotions kept in check for the sake of her children, her focus maintained on keeping their home and food on the table. Janós, one can assume, felt emasculated, depressed, and unloved. Sometimes doing what you have to do just isn't enough..
One day, a Croatian bachelor named Mike Grotch entered the scene, renting a room an board from the family. The details are quite fuzzy, but somewhere along the way, Mike and Katherine fell in love and Katherine dumped poor Janós. He was thrown out of the home, only to return in a last ditch effort to maintain a connection with his children. One night, he crept into his former home, snatched the five young ones, and took off into the darkness. Mike Grotch pursued him, retrieved the children, and told Janós if he ever showed his face in those parts again, he would be shot.
The children never saw their biological father again and in from then on referred to Mike as "daddy" and considered him, without a doubt, their real father. He had saved them and their mother from lives of hardscrabble misery. Janós Apjók vanished into history, never to be heard from again. No one knew or apparently cared what became of him. Kathie says all her grandmother would say about him is that he was "a little man", her voice full of contempt.
Kathie's family assumed that Janós returned to Hungary. He was rarely discussed....Mike Grotch had taken over completely as the family patriarch in the family's hearts and minds.
THE PLANETS ALIGNED
We rolled into Monok on a cold, damp, winter's day. Boone did an excellent job both driving and navigating for the first time, in the rented car, in this unfamiliar terrain. Monok is about a 2-3 hour drive on the M3 from Budapest.
Janós Apjok's decendants
City hall was the obvious place to look for records of citizens present and past. Városház in Monok was squeezed in between a couple of sörözők (pubs) and up the road from Kossuth Lajós birthplace. It was a small but slightly intimidating little place, if only by virtue of how foreign (and yet slightly familiar) the setting was and how alien we were, seeking a connection in this very small town. We no sooner walked into the building, took a left, opened a small door, and stated our business (which was to inquire about access public records or any information at all about related to Katherine Bodnar, married to Janós Apjók) when the mayor herself sashayed out of her office and led us inside the humbly elegant room.
The newly elected mayor of Monok was an attractive, stylish woman in her early fifties. She was wonderfully hospitable and possessed the air of a woman who had recently taken charge, in the process of tidying up a slightly messy political situation. She offered us water, coffee, and pastries.
At this point, there was no one in the office who could speak English effectively. We knew something was going on here, this sort of treatment was not how the people of Monok typically greet the very occasional Amerikoik that wander in off the main drag. The mayor called an English speaking friend in Debrecen to translate what she had to tell Kathie about her grandparents.
Through the friend, the mayor told us that she knew of someone that was looking for information about Janós Apjók. This person was her cousin, Sylvie, who lived in Miskolc, a fairly short distance away. Sylvie was related to the Apjók family, through her mother and aunt. The aunt lived in nearby Szerenc.
Sylvie said she had been researching her uncle as the family did not know that much about him. They knew he had moved to Wyoming and had toiled away at the top of a coal-mine in the United States. She forwarded to the mayor a website she had some across in her research. The site turned out to be all about Cambria, Wyoming.
I was so full of coffee and water, I took several trips to the little bathroom in the main hall. The place was fairly empty, aside from the occasional clerk or citizen . A worried pair of Roma women sat silently together in the reception area.
During these frequent trips to the WC, a lot was going down inside the mayor's office. Connections were rapidly snapping together, things were happening fast. The Cambria, Wyoming coincidence quickly obscured any doubt that Sylvie and her aunt were Kathie, Boone, and Aidan's distant cousins of one remove or another. Both women were on their way to Monok, and one of them, Sylvie, spoke English.
I went to the bathroom again, this time stopping to look at the sleeping succulents placed in a dark recess in the main hall. With my thumb and forefinger, I pinched a cutting off a pine-like, creeping sedum.
We waited, remarked about how, well, amazing all of this was. I was a mere spectator, really, and happy just to watch it all unfold, fascinated, but not so personally invested. For me, it was a little like watching a History Channel documentary. And the day continued to unfold similarly.
Another trip to the bathroom, another succulent cutting. I had a miniature xeriscape collection inside my sweater pocket. The Roma women, looking increasingly worried, sat huddled together on the reception couch.
It was about an hour later that, as we were chatting about how uncanny these events had been, when a short, stout woman, dress in a black, felt coat and hat, entered the mayor's office. Her merry, chatty energy immediately filled the room. At the mayor's direction, she walked over to Kathie and gave her a huge hug. Happy tears were shed as Sylvie's aunt greeted us all with a warmth that seemed to make the sun come out.
Shortly thereafter, Sylvie and her family arrived from Miskolc. Sylvie Kiss ( pronounced "keesh") had come with her whole family...husband Zoli, son Tomás, and daughter Tamara. The aunt, whose named Piroska, greeted each family member with a hug and kiss.
I retired to the bathroom one more time, deciding along the way not to pluck a tiny optunia from its mother plant. Upon my return to the mayor's office, I noticed that the Roma were no longer on the reception sofa.
During my final trip into the main hall, Kathie and Boone were learning that their grandfather/great grandfather had indeed returned to Hungary, but then returned to the U.S., settling in Cleveland, Ohio. The mass card that Piroska, had received said he died in 1850 and was a widower...no children were mentioned. The mass card did not reveal his birthday, which was unknown to Boone and Kathie. Unknown to Janós' Hungarian family was the existence of Katherine Bodnar, his former wife and mother of his five children. No records of her seemed to exist in Monok's city hall either. She was becoming a mystery almost equal to her ex-husband.
The Apjóks had been a wealthy family in Monok. Apparently they owned quite a bit of land back in the years before Janós took off for the New World. Naturally, a lot had happened, both to the Apjók family and the town of Monok since then.
Piroska and Sylvie offered to take us on a guided tour of the village, full of personal history, in an effort to fill in the blanks, then visit the cemetery in search of deceased Bodnars and Apjóks.
We trekked the small distance from city hall, past the remaining wall of a once mighty castle, up through a neighborhood where Piroska could show us a plot of former Apjók real estate. In the place of the original house, whose appearance I can only imagine, sat a cute, smaller cottage painted a savory, coral hue that seemed to almost glow against the darkening sky.
Former Apjok Property, Dózse György Utca
Even as the sun began to set, our group headed to the city cemetery, where we would look for resting Bodnars and find more proof of the Apjók's wealth. This cemetery is the site of a summerly festival in Monok, called the Kálvária, during which the faithful come from far and wide to attend. The celebration includes a walk through the city cemetery, up the hill which leads past deceased Catholics as well as humble but prominent stations of the cross, each one purchased by an influential family from the area. The eighth station was purchased by the Apjók family and was a clear source of pride for Piroska.
cemetery gates
Piroska and the Eighth Station
The cemetery crawl was a small pilgrimage unto itself...ad hoc and informal, meaningful nonetheless. Nightime arrived as the church clock struck four-thirty and everyone was invited to Piroska's home in Szerenc for dinner. Her husband Sándor had been slaving over a hot stove in our honor, how could we say no? It was classic Hungarian hospitality, all give and no take, sparing no expense, never skimping on comfort.
Winter fog had settled densely upon the landscape so the short drive to Szerenc felt sketchier than was comfortable. Boone simply followed the tail lights of Sylivie's car and soon we were parking in front of a tiny cottage, obscured by dormant vines. In the doorway stood a slim, older man with smiling eyes and a thick head of grey hair. He was lean and sinewy, a striking contrast to Piroska's round fluffiness. Her husband Sándor was waiting for our arrival and showed no outward sign that he had been furiously at work in his kitchen, just smiled, cool as the cucumbers that sat in sweet vinegar , just inside, on the dinner table. Much of the time, Sándor muttered to himself, upstaged as he was by the extremely out-going and talkative Piroska, grinning and shaking his head.
Three kinds of sausages. Roast chicken. Delightfully lumpy mashed potatoes. Homemade pickles, whose flavor balanced sublimely between sweet and savory. White bread with chewy crust, similar to Tuscan bread. Home canned cherries flavored with almond extract. Much more that escapes my memory, washed down with several choices of beverage: soda, palinka, beer, wine. Home baked, apricot linzer cookies for dessert. Yeah. In keeping with our goal to maintain a healthy gut pack with every meal, we made quick work of Sándor's meal. Burp. Yum. Kolbázs.
ERDOBENYE
After the fine meal at Piroska's, we waddled out the door, promising to return the next morning for breakfast. Sylvie's cousin, Piroska's nephew, Vince, would be joining us and would bring along his English speaking son. The fog had settled down for the night, snoozing, showing no signs of rising. Boone, expert driver that he is, navigated through the cloud, into the elevation, up to Erdobenye, where we would spend the night. We stayed at a charming inn, The Magitta, which sat at the top of a hilly drive. Not much to say about it since we just slept in its ski chalet style rooms. The place was charming and very comfortable.
Next morning revealed rounded mountain foothills surrounding the town...the fog, always the rambler, had moved on. We did not have much time to look around this small town, we were expected at Piroska's for breakfast. I did manage to get a photo of this sculpture in the hotel's courtyard.
It was as if they had never gone to bed. Piroska and Sándor welcomed us back ino their home, now smelling of fried onions and hospitality. We sat down once more at the couple's dining table (in a room, typically old school Hungarian, which served not only as a dining space, but also as a bedroom and t.v. room) and were served a mouthwatering concoction that I can only describe as Hungarian chilaquiles. Eggy, tomatoey, and extremely salty, it was delicious, a truly decadent breakfast.
Vince and his son Dáni ate reggeli (breakfast) with us, and Dáni patiently translated for us Piroska's stream of commentary. Sándor continued to grin and mutter contentedly.
MÁD
If it seemed as if fate was smiling upon the American branch of the Apjók family (and I am agnostic concerning the concept of fate), she certainly was not finished bestowing delightful surprised upon it.
Turns out Piroska's nephew, Vince Gergely, is a successful vintner. His cellars produce some of the finest whites wines to come out of the Tokaj region. Six putunyos Tokaji Azu...nothing better.
We drove out to Mád on this clear, cool day to the Gergely family's palatial wine-country abode. The home was as different from Piroska's cottage as the village of Monok was from Budapest. Palatial and elegantly stark, it had the look of a Californian dream villa. But how many villas in California (bless her) sit on top of a three hundred year old plus (up to eight hundred) wine cellar? Have a look....
very old wine casks
cellar symmetry
ancient mold, noble rot, newish stairway
Wine tasting cave....Piroska stands between Aidan and
Kathie. The two stunned looking men are Dáni and
Vince.
sleeping vineyards of Mád
hobbit wine cellar?
I managed to do a bit of plant collecting in Mád as well... a few errant succulents and a lavender twig lying among them on the ground. It's what I do.....
A whole hell of a lot happened during that brief trip. The lives of Boone, Kathie, and Aidan changed forever, gently and delightfully. I collected the beginnings of a great succulent population, spiny little souvenirs of the trip. Really, this is the kind of story that really deserves the voice of an effective and emotive oral story teller, around a campfire or something. I have wrestled with this true story (perhaps unnecessarily) for weeks over its telling and I have come to the conclusion that it's just one of those family history jewels whose impact cannot be expressed on a mere blog.
It has been a few weeks since these events occured...Boone, Aidan, and I are going to see the Kiss family on Sunday and research into the lives of Katherine and Janós is still taking place. Boone flirts with the idea of trying to import Vince's excellent Tokaji. My succulent collection is thriving, living souvenirs from our adventure in Monok. x
