The next day was Sunday, the last full day of our trip. We rented a car – a black Mercedes sedan, very slick – and drove out into the countryside to the town of Mör, where my father was born and grew up. This was a very special part of the trip for me personally because I still have family there and so we visited them for the day.
My dad left Hungary as a teenager along with my grandparents and my Uncle Steve amid the Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe in the aftermath of World War II. They lived in Germany for a year and then emigrated to Canada. He did not go back to visit until after the the Soviet Union collapsed and Hungary was under democratic government, in the 1990’s.
My grandparent’s house in Mör was bombed and destroyed during the war. My grandmother’s sister was their next-door neighbor and the two families shared a yard. That house stayed in the family. Apparently my father kept in touch with his cousin Rosszi, who lives there now. So they invited us to visit. In addition to Rosszi was her daughter Zsuzsi and husband Laci, and their son, also Laci. They are the nicest, warmest people you could ever hope to meet, especially as we’d never been there before and they’d never met us. They invited us in and treated us like, well, family.
My dad must have kept in touch with Rosszi because she had lots of pictures from over the years and knew exactly who we were: photos of Jeannie and me from our wedding day, of my Mum and Dad visiting when we’d just bought our house and Lizzy was a baby, and going further back of me and my brothers when we were kids, of my parents looking young and glamorous in the early 1960’s, and then of my dad and uncle as youths in Hungary, and my grandparents when they were young. Some of these I haven’t seen in a long, long time, many I’d never seen.
Zsuzsi speaks some English, and young Laci is fluent, so he acted as translator. His English is excellent, with an accent halfway between proper received British and hollywood American; he reminds me of a cross between a blonde Harry Potter and my brother Martin when he was that age, particularly his sense of humor. Laci is studying computer science at Budapest University. Alot of engineers and computer scientists in my family, especially on my dad’s side. And Hungary is of course known for its mathematicians, physicists and that sort of thing, so it’s good to see someone of the younger generation carrying on in that tradition.
Meanwhile I’d been boning up on my Hungarian language skills, so I understood a fair amount, but as with German, if I have to string more than an few words together it’s hard to do in real time. As it turns out, most of the Hungarian words I know are for food, so that was useful. My most used word was probably köszönöm.
So they took us around and we saw the church where my grandparents were married and my dad was baptized, we saw the school they attended as kids. There’s a local landmark called Lamberg-kastély, the former home of a local noble family, that is now a library and a museum of the area’s history. The town is small and this was all a short walk from their home. After a tour there, which included some surprise origami, we went to lunch at a local German restaurant that had Hungarian food too. We started with húsleves with csiga tészta for everyone, and uborkasaláta, then wienerschinzel with mushrooms, potatoes with a fried egg on top, and things like that. All very good. We saw the local cemetery where my great grandparents, the common ancestors of us and Rosszi’s family, are resting in peace. For my kids this was connecting back five generations, across three centuries, which is pretty amazing when you stop to think about it.
Mör is a famous wine making region, and when the Szingers lived in Hungary they had a farm and vineyards and made wine from the grapes they grew and sold it mainly to hotels and taverns, and that was the family business. Apparently this goes back to the time when they came down the Danube from Germany in the 1700’s. Our family’s land was collectivized long ago, but winemaking lives on, so we saw the vineyards up the hillsides on the south-facing slopes, alot like Napa Valley in California. We saw the presshouses at the bottom of the hill. These have large tunnels going into the mountainside to serve as cellars to keep the wine cool. I’m told the Szinger’s one was uses as a shelter during the war.
When we got back to the house, Laci senior, who is a carpenter, showed us his workshop. It was connected to a building that was also used in winemaking and contains an old, old wine press. The thing was the size of a truck and probably 100 years old. My dad had built a model of the traditional wine press they used, so I had and idea of what it was and how it operated. Still the size of the thing was impressive. The main arm was made of a tree trunk well over a foot thick and probably twenty feet long. Although it hadn’t been used in a long time it was still in working order. Interesting to ponder what might have been if history had not intervened.
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Back in Budapest that night it was our last fancy Hungarian meal, again at the Italian/Hungarian place next door to our hotel. I accidentally ordered three orders of the desert plate with three kinds of strüdel! All in all not a bad mistake to have made.
We were up bright and early to catch a cab to the airport. The first part of the trip was nice and relaxed. We even had time to pick up some palinka and at the duty-free shop in Budapest Airport. We had a connection to make in Amsterdam (county number six). There was almost an hour to catch the next flight after we landed, but for some reason the gate wasn’t available for our plane, so we sat on the tarmac for a half hour or so, until the situation became a bit desperate. It led to a mad dash thru Amsterdam airport, which is huge. Then Michelle got caught in some security station because the machine wouldn’t recognize her as the person in her passport photo! We made it to the gate just in time. Then that plan sat there for another half hour. Ah well I was in business class and they immediately offered me a cold beer. Coming west we lost six hours and so even though it was a seven hour flight we landed in the afternoon, an hour after we took off.
We got back home and all’s week that ends well. That was two weeks ago already and we’re back into the day to day routine here. We’re still figuring out were some of the souvenirs should go, and of course I have thousands of pictures to look thru and organize, but that’s a project for this fall. It was as great trip and a fantastic experience, and wonderful to get a sense of the geography, culture, architecture, history, language, music, all that great food, and to connect with family and learn something about my own heritage, and to be able to share it all with Jeanne and the girls. I hope I get a chance to back to that part of the world again some day.
