Why come to Slaka?

For those of you not in the know, which is probably most of you other than my children, Why Come to Slaka? is a book by Malcolm Bradbury. Learned heads have suggested that it was a pastiche of Communist Romania or Bulgaria. Personally, I always felt it was more like Yugoslavia, as it lacks Romania's cult of Ceaușescu and Bulgaria's brutal secret police, which were defining characteristics for the people living in those countries.

Anyway, as a result of reading that, "Slakan" has become the code-word Alison and I have for some of the more external elements of European Communism – covering Socialist Realist art, Brutalist architecture, excessive and overblown industrialisation, crazy and inefficient economic techniques, appalling living accommodation and poor living standards. Anything that defines the East under Communism relative to the West. One of the reasons for spending so much time in the Balkans is to get to see as much of Slaka as possible.

So we went to the Belgrade modern art museum. I don't generally like art museums of the twentieth century that much, but I am an absolute sucker for Slakan art. I went happily, expecting pictures of happy workers, resolute farmers and staunch women in simple Socialist Realist forms. It turns out that the artists of Yugoslavia were basically completely in line with Western Europe and there wasn't any sign of the stodgy Communist art I had expected. 

Some of it astounded me. Pieces that would have sent an artist to the Gulag within minutes if produced in any other country in the Eastern Bloc.

Comrade Tito, White Violet, Our Youth Loves You

It seems that Tito's very early falling out with Stalin meant that Yugoslavia never experienced anything remotely resembling Stalinist methods. Tito was still a dictator, and the economic system wasn't Capitalist, but the Yogoslavs didn't suffer anything like the same repression as the Soviet bloc. Art was not constrained to ideological straitjackets, religions were allowed to operate and there was freedom of movement.

However, all was not lost on the hunt for things Slakan. It turns out that our last day in Belgrade was Tito's birthday, 25 May. It seems it was his "birthday" in the same way the Queen luckily has a birthday on Queen's Birthday. Anyway, it is the day they celebrate him. So we trucked along to his tomb – fortunately he wasn't embalmed in the Lenin manner, but instead has a sarcophagus in one of his former residences.

Some people obviously miss the old man, and were there in their red caps and scarves, to pay their respects. Not that many, and almost all quite old, but certainly in the hundreds. We avoided paying our respects at the sarcophagus itself, and tried to keep our amusement quiet in the circumstances, but it was definitely a good day to visit the museum.

Tito fans. Not young. 

(For the record, although Tito certainly still has his fans, we saw no other sign that Belgrade and Serbia had ever been Communist. Some of the statues and monuments from that era remain, but all hint at their meaning has been removed from view. There's a statue downtown to Gavrilo Princip, the fool that shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand and started WWI, but we saw not a single one to any political figure from 1945 to 1990.)

However, while Yugoslavia was spared the worst horrors of political Communism, it most certainly was not spared the architecture. Huge concrete tower blocks, most often in groups of three, dotted the skylines of Belgrade. The new suburb of Novi Beograd (New Belgrade) is a delight in that regard – for a certain meaning of delight.

Whole blocks, with imaginative names like Block 42, Block 43A and Akademika, are built entirely in a single style of concrete apartment building. Most not aging particularly well, it has to be said.

Block 33A. There seemed like half a kilometre of this style building, over several blocks.

To be fair, some of the public buildings from this era are remarkably successful, despite their Brutalist concrete techniques. The Modern Art Museum building is fantastic, and the Military Hospital is quite striking. Some of the others would be fine if they were maintained better.

We made a bit of a pilgrimage to the most famous of all the buildings from that era, the Eastern Gate. It's hard to judge really whether it is successful or not, being very much of its time, but it sure is quintessentially Slakan.

The Eastern Gate. The left half is residential, the right half is business (currently largely empty)

So, Belgrade was fun for us fans of Brutalist architecture.

I might get round to describing the modern city that the rest of you might visit. But probably not. 

The Great Hungarian Plain

Alison, the kids and I spent a week in Budapest a dozen years ago, so we decided that we would not go back there, because we felt it wasn't the best use of our time to repeat places. Budapest was a good place to visit, so Alison booked us in for two weeks in Hungary. We were coming from Romania, so it made sense to stay in the eastern side.

Now most of you won't know much about Hungary, but it was settled by the Huns after Attila's death. They liked it, and were able to conquer it, because the open spaces suit a horse nomad nation. Later their medieval descendants were able to conquer the hilly parts around, but the east of the country is pretty much entirely the Great Hungarian Plain.

And it is pretty planar. There's none of that "rolling" plain nonsense. It's just flat.

Hundreds of kilometres of this.

However, while the countryside doesn't vary much in height, it is quite pleasing on the eye. It is far from empty – being fertile, it is full of towns – and the farming is mixed, rather than miles of just one crop. There are trees and forests too.

It also doesn't drain very well and there are only a couple of rivers, which means that there are frequent marshy spots, both big and small. I suspect most of the forest areas are left in trees because they are too wet to farm well. These wetlands areas support quite a lot of bird life, and we saw from the trains a whole host of bird species, as well as the occasional deer. The large number of shooting huts, raised on piles, reflect that abundance.

The towns we went to were a mixed bag. Hungary was long prosperous, didn't get too badly damaged in WWII, and the Communist government didn't build too many ugly tower blocks or boastful central city palaces. The result is that most of the town centres remain quite pretty.

Szeged, was particularly nice, as the centre is full of Art Nouveau buildings due to a flood in the late 19th century that required the rebuilding of almost the entire town centre. Almost all the government buildings were built in a consistent style of brick and plaster from the rebuilding that I found very pleasant.

Not many NZ high schools look this good. The inside is also Art Nouveau.

The towns we went to differed in their interest, but sometimes if they were weren't very interesting we were able to see some places nearby. So when in Eger, which has a famous castle and a few churches, but little else, we went to a a couple of nearby places.

However, it did depend on where the towns were relative to the plain. Eger is on the northern edge, so it backed onto hills, which meant vineyards and forests to walk in. Pecs is on the southern edge, so there was a castle on a hill in a nearby village and vineyards again.

However Szolnok is in the middle of the plain. We ran out of things to do there quickly, and everywhere around was also in the middle of the plain. It's not the worst place we have visited – Biela Podlaska in Poland (in the middle of flat Poland) takes some beating – but it is up there.

For us on this trip, days with not much to do aren't that much of a problem. Since we had spare time I had my hair cut, we got some washing done, and generally we caught up on everyday things that still need doing. Travelling for so long is exhausting, and it is actually quite a relief to have days when we don't charge from sight to sight.

For a short trip where using your time efficiently is important it would be different. If you do visit Hungary – and really there is no reason not to, apart from their bizarre language – it's probably best not to spend too much time in the towns in the middle of the Plain. The ones on the edge are where the interest is.

Travelling. Always travelling

One of the things that concerned us before planning a six month trip of Europe was that we would tire of all the travel – that we would get a couple of months in and have had enough. Well, fortunately there's no sign of that yet, and we are past a quarter of the way in, so I can't see it being a major concern.

Shifting towns every three or four days is less hassle than I thought it might be. Modern phone technology means it is hard to get lost or struggle to find things because we always know where we are, using GoogleMaps or equivalent. All our accommodation is pre-booked, so there's no problems on arriving (and we aren't generally going very far each time, so we arrive at a decent time and not tired). The local transport has proved to be very efficient and we haven't had too many dramas about buying tickets.

Changing towns might not be so bad, but changing countries is a pain. You just start getting comfortable with one place –  learning the currency, how the transport systems work, the key terms you need, what foods they have in the supermarket –  and then you move to another country. and have to start all over again.

Hungary has been terrible like that, because the language is so different from any we have any previous knowledge of. We haven't eaten at McDonalds, but I have shown a sample of a advert below to illustrate the problem – even though I know what they serve pretty precisely, I still cannot make out a single word other than "burger".

This is not helped by Hungarians speak surprisingly little English –  doing German at school from what we can gather. There is a lot of pointing, and some guessing. Sometimes pictures are helpful – getting the battery changed in my watch was quite easy once I used a picture of a watch battery to hold next to it.

A few sacrifices have been made. We didn't have a lot of stuff even from the start of the trip, because we had only a 28 kg limit on the flights to and from Cyprus (bag and hand luggage combined), but quite a lot has been shed since then. Lifting heavy bags to overhead storage on the trains and up and down stairs got to be a bit too tiring. I chucked out a whole bunch of clothes, shoes and books that still had a bit of life in them, but were six kilograms I didn't have to cart round. Alison shed our emergency towels and a couple of other things at the same time. A useful side-effect is that my bag is now extremely easy to pack each shift of town, because it has room to spare, rather than a puzzle about how to fit it all in.

We have also been walking quite a lot – Alison's phone thinks she has done 1,000 km since we left NZ, and that seems about right –  with a cost in blisters and worn out shoes.

Today's our last day in Hungary, as tomorrow we go to Belgrade. I'll write up something on Hungary when we get there, as it is a week's stop, so time to catch up a bit on things. 

Unfortified Transylvania

Transylvania is really quite pretty, and deserves to be better known as a tourist destination really. Its quite easy to get around and because Romanian is far easier to deal with than the surrounding languages for a person with some French or Italian shopping and ordering food is much easier than Bulgaria or Hungary.

The Carpathian mountains are nice to look at and relatively easy to avoid having to go through too much. The rolling hills do slow down cars and trains, but are far more interesting than the great plains of some of the neighbouring areas. Bucharest is quite cool to visit, but the surrounding areas isn't just flat, it's also more or less empty of anything much interesting to look at.

I've mentioned in the previous post about how it is loaded with the remains of military architecture. Well it's equally stacked if you are into churches. There are large numbers of adherents of Romanian Orthodox, Catholic and Lutheran religion, as well as a few smaller branches, and each village tends to have a church in more than one of the flavours, most often all three. Since the building traditions and interior decorating for each is wildly different it adds a variety not found in areas of Europe where the winners of the Wars of Religion imposed far more uniformity.

The Lutheran churches are the ones Alison and I prefer aesthetically. They are basically identical to their North German and Scandinavian models, with quite stripped back interiors. I kept thinking that their steeples are taller than I'm used to though.

The Catholic ones are generally like French ones (nothing too Baroque or Rococo) except for the ones that changed affiliation and lost their decoration during their protestant phases. (Cluj cathedral went from pre-reformation Catholic, through Lutheran, Calvinist, Unitarian and back to Catholic again). Again, there seems to be an emphasis on height.

Cluj Catholic Cathedral. That is one tall nave.

The Romanian Orthodox are in the standard Orthodox tradition. Generally a Greek cross floor plan rather than a nave and topped with domes. Many of them are considerably taller than they are wide, which leads to a sort of reverse vertigo in the biggest ones -- they are just too tall to be pleasant.

Cluj Orthodox Cathedral. The central dome and pillared support 

would be a decent church height in its own right.

I wonder if the height of the local Lutheran and Catholic spires and naves isn't at least in part a response to these enormously tall competing buildings being built across town from them.

The interiors of the Orthodox are all much more heavily decorated than any western church. Icons are present in large numbers, and believers pray in front of them as a matter of course (often giving them a kiss on the way out). The very best ones are covered entirely in highly coloured pictures on every flat surface (usually saints rather than scenes from the bible). Alison and I had seen Orthodox churches in the Baltic, but these are much more decorated.

The Romanian Orthodox was favoured by the Romanian Communists relative to the other religions, although any genuinely religious clergy faced repression. It therefore came out of that era much wealthier than the other churches and they seem determined to show it. Cluj has a monstrous new cathedral being built which seems far larger than anything it could actually need.

Cluj new cathedral under construction

But the most dramatic is the cathedral being built in Bucharest. This new church, which is near completion will be the largest Orthodox church in the world (currently the holder is one in Moscow which is so heavy it is sinking into the ground). Vast doesn't begin to cover it.

Amusingly it is behind Ceausescu's ridiculously large "Palace of the People" (the second largest administrative building in the world, behind the pentagon, and a ridiculous white elephant). Well, many people don't think it particularly amusing, including quite a few Romanians, because it is just too big and expensive to be justified in any reasonable way.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_People%27s_Salvation_Cathedral