2020: Go to Hell

 Really what is there to say about 2020 that has not already been said and re-said.  The world had a couple of months at the beginning of the year before everything came crashing down.  Everyone's horror story of March to the end of the year is both different and the same.  All of us (to one degree or another) suffered the isolation and fear of the pandemic. Many of us suffered more: those who were ill or died,  those who valiantly took care of them; those who mourned the loss; those who got us food; those that kept things going.  And then there's the reckoning of racial justice that finally erupted this summer, bringing to our consciences debts long past due.  And of course the nightmare of the election, which still--this the last day of the year--isn't over.  

Of course it wasn't all bad. Great scientists produced a vaccine (even if most of us have no idea how and when we will get it).  Trump will be out of office in less than three weeks.  Gridlock continues, who knows how politics will actually play out.  Biden is a sane and decent man.  (When I get glum, I think of how worse it would be if Trump had managed to stay in office.  And there are, thankfully, daily pleasures: friends at the lake, new enthusiasm for cooking, I'm sure there's something else... . 

So here I sit, at the very end of this long-long year with nothing much to say.  Not even to myself.  I stopped not only blogging but also keeping a daily record book of what I have done, read, watched, ate, etc.--something I had previously done for most of my adult life.

I have stopped marking my days period.  They remain one big blur of boredom and lack of concentration.  (I am suffering brain fog and even have trouble reading really complex books--though it is getting better. ) So this is for myself; to try to keep myself accountable to living in time: paying attention, fighting isolation, focusing on doing something worthwhile.    

Fingers crossed for a better year ahead: one that is not only disease free but also more equitable, more generous, and more interesting (in a good way).

PS  One thing I did accomplish was to finally organize and clean my kitchen; hence the picture at the top.

 

What is This? Learning about Hungarian Architecture in Timisoara

This is one of the first pictures I took of this dilapidated but enigmatic building.  It was March 2009 in Timisoara Romania, and I was fascinated with it--returning many times over the next 3 months (and during later visits) to look and take pictures of its various details.  But when I left Timisoara for the last time in 2015, I knew nothing more than I did when I first saw it: who made it, who lived there, when was it made, what style it was built in--all questions unanswered.  I now know a good deal more about this building, and I will tell you its story after a brief digression.

In the spring of 2009, my husband Tony was a Senior Fulbright Scholar in Timisoara where he taught American literature at the University of the West.  I was on sabbatical.  I knew very little about Timisoara except that it was where the 1989 Revolution began.  I also knew vaguely and came to know intimately that Timisoara was notable for its turn-of-the-century architecture--estimated at 1400 buildings--the largest "patrimony" in Romania.   When we arrived in Timisoara in February 2009, it was very cold, snowy, and icy, thus not conducive to long walks.  I walked some in my neighborhood but never ventured much further afield.  By March the sun was shining and the snow mostly gone, so I decided to start exploring the city.

The old part of Timisoara is divided into four sections.  Cetate, where we lived, is the original Timisoara,  once surrounded by fortifications that, when finally removed, allowed urban expansion to the other side of the Bega river/canal.  This expansion resulted in the three other sections of central Timisoara; in chronological order Iosefin, Elisabetin, and Fabric.  In my first jaunt out, I consulted the short section in the Blue Guide to Romania on Timisoara's Art Nouveau architecture, grabbed a map, and took my first walk into the major architectural treasures across the Bega. My destination was Piata Plevni, which is known for its two "peacock houses," designed and built by Marton Gemeinhardt.  They are amazing, and I will do another post on them because they too were crucial to my understanding of Timisoara's architecture. 

On the way to the peacock houses, though, I walked down  what I thought to be Bul. 16 Decembrie 1989 (the name commemorating the revolution from Communism),  the main dividing street between Iosefin and Elisabetan, but which is actually Piata Sfanta Maria for two blocks before it becomes the Bul.16 Decembrie 1989. There (though I didn't know real address until much later) at Piata Sfanta Maria number 6, I first saw this building I came to love.  Why did I love it so much?  Over the months of my 2009 visit, and many other Fulbright visits in the years that followed, I have taken literally hundreds of pictures of this building.  I looked carefully and, thanks to the powerful lens on my camera, learned how to see details on a building such as this.  So here are some of the details that have allured me.  

First the beautiful circular window in the middle of the top of the facade.  Though it is broken and dirty, its shape and lines became for me one of the canonical emblems of Art Nouveau.

 Also the small symmetrical windows around the circle, and the tops of pediments that eventually run down the face of the building itself.

And the Art Nouveau motifs: organic imagery, flowing and intricately entwined lines (coup de fouet) and geometric symmetries.  

 

 

The more I looked, what at first seemed disparate elements came together for me in one aesthetic whole. 

The challenges I faced understanding this building were many.  First, I had to look beyond the grime and disrepair, so typical of Timisoara's architectural heritage.  Second, I had to "fill in the blanks" where some of the symmetries  were effaced.  (I talk more about this process in an earlier post, The Constructing Eye.) Third, I had to try to find information about this building. Here I went straight to the internet because I had no access to research in English on Timisoara architecture.  Eventually I did learn (and I am now embarrassed to admit it) that Timisoara was part of Hungary until the end of the first world war and was called Temesvar.  Even with this information I could get little information of any detail.  There were, I was sure, physical archives, but searching these with no Romanian or Hungarian was not an option.  So I just kept looking.  As I looked and scoured what little information I could find, I decided that the style was a blend of Eclectic Historicism and Art Nouveau and that it was probably built around 1900.  

But between 2009 and now things have changed.  I had found out a lot more about Hungarian architecture of the period, reading everything I could find in English.  Also, Timisoara is going to be the European Cultural Capital in 2021, and an influx of money has spruced the city up.  Many buildings (but not this one) have been renovated.  Also, as in Hungary, many of the archives have been digitized and though accessing them is not easy, there now are blogs and websites built by people who have gone through archives, that provide some context and history for some of Timisoara's notable architecture.  

A few weeks ago, for some reason I started thinking about Timisoara, and plugged a couple of street addresses into google.  There I found two extremely interesting sites: a wikiwand site for Iosefin and Elisabeta and a site called Heritage of Timisoara .  The first covers more buildings, but the second provides more detail. Both agree on the following facts.  The building pictured above is called Palatal  Istvan Nemes: the bottom floor housed shops,  and the upper floors were apartments.  It was built in 1902, in the Art Nouveau style and the role of architect is attributed to Lipot Baumhorn.   The Heritage of Timisoara describes the building as follows:

Built in the 1900s style, the István Nemes Apartment Building has three storeys and closes the perspective of the Gheorghe Doja Street.  The roof area is decorated with pediments typical of the architecture at beginning of the 20th century, decorated with Art Nouveau elements. The facade is adorned with phytomorphic ornaments, in particular lines ending in whip-like curves (coup de fouet), as well as with anthropomorphic and geometric ornaments.  The ground floor of the building, meant for commercial purposes, has been modified and no longer reads as one unit. . . .  The land was bought by István Nemes from Timisoara City Hall in 1902, valuing 8556 crowns. The palace was erected in the same year in just 7 months (April 16 - November 5, 1902).

I could find no further information about Istvan Nemes of Temesvar.  But I did know quite a bit about Lipot Baumhorn, and connecting him to the Palatal Nemes was a significant find.  

Baumhorn was a Hungarian architect best known for building synagogues, many but not all of which still stand.  His most famous synagogue is the Szeged Synagogue, which is magnificent.  He also built a synagogue in the Fabric section of Timisoara.  It is incredibly beautiful but also incredibly endangered, and no entrance is allowed.  From the outside:

Baumhorn actually built quite a lot in Timisoara, including the Palatal Apelor from 1900, and located right down the street from the Palatal Nemes at Piata Sfanta Maria 2.    

The attribution of the Palatal Nemes to Baumhorn is, from what little I could gather, based primarily on similarities of style with other work by Baumhorn.  You can decide for yourself.  But here are two small figures, the first from the Palatal Apelor and the second from Palatal Nemes .

That day in March when I first visited Iosefin, I saw many buildings that were to become equally treasured.  But my main impression of the day was the sheer magnitude of what I was seeing.  Street after street of buildings: some (most) in decay, some (fewer) renovated.  It was as though I had stumbled into another world entirely.

Navigating those streets, throughout all four of Timisoara's historic areas, became an intellectual and aesthetic adventure.  The more I looked, the more I found patterns and differences.  This first immersion into Hungarian architecture of the late 19th and early 20th centuries was the source of all that I would later learn of the extraordinary phenomena of architectural change that spanned the whole of the Austro-Hungarian Empire as well as western Europe and the world beyond (e.g., Istanbul, Buenos Aires, Chicago, Lima and more).  

Just a couple of weeks before we left Timisoara in June 2009, Tony found, bought, and carried back to the US a big book about turn of the century architecture (e.g., Art Nouveau, Secession, Jugendstil, Liberty):  When Buildings Speak: Architecture as Language in the Habsburg Empire and Its Aftermath 1867-1933, by Anthony Alofsin, published by University of Chicago Press in 2006.  It was my first introduction to real scholarship.  Reading Alofsin gave me a kind of clarity which I had previously lacked and led me to a bibliography of other such scholarship. This scholarship underpins my understanding of the buildings I fell in love with.  But the first level immersion--based on intense looking--remains for me as indispensable as anything I read.  It endows what I learned from reading with detail, nuance, and passion.

There are many more conventionally beautiful buildings in Timisoara, and I am contemplating more posts.  In another future post, I am going to try to explain why I became a kind of amateur historian of Hungary's architectural heritage. Why it is important, to me, to rescue a building from (my own sense of) anonymity--giving it a history: a date, an address, an architect or builder, a set of inhabitants, a style.  But also, and perhaps more fundamentally, why I personally fell in love with these buildings so immediately and so deeply. These are complicated questions for me, and I hope to try to figure them out by writing.

  

#TimisoaraArchitecture

#Iosefin

#PalatalIstvanNemes

 

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Blogging in an Age of Pandemic: A Personal Quandary

[Note:  I haven't blogged for about 3 months.  I debated about whether to post this piece or not.  It's very introspective and self-centered.  But I felt I needed something to transition from blogging before the pandemic to blogging after. I am really trying to figure out what my blog should look like when life has pretty much closed down except for home.  Anyway apologies if this is too diary-esque.]

We got home from Budapest the middle of March.  For two and a half months I stayed inside our condo except to walk in the park or on Cherokee Road with Tony.  At the end of May Louisville entered its early opening up, and I ventured out to see my physician for my annual physical and to get my hair cut.  Then we left for the lake, getting here June 1 and planning to stay until October.

It has now been about three months since I blogged.

The two and a half months in Louisville were basically event-less.  Life was one-day-after another; no narrative push.  Everyday was the same, and everyday felt like I had accomplished nothing.  I had a lot of trouble concentrating, mostly caused by the fear of the disease and by isolation.  I felt alone and disconnected, except for Tony who carried me through.   I stopped doing a lot of things I normally do--and could have done in my Louisville condo--such as reading, writing (book, blog, emails, etc.) and thinking interesting thoughts.  As one of my FB friends wrote," how can life be so terrifying and boring at the same time?"

Now, don't get me wrong.  I am not saying my experience of the pandemic is worse or even as bad as that of most people.  I am retired, so don't have to worry about working from home of losing employment.  I have a comfortable place to live that is bright and safe and uncrowded.  And I live in a state where the Governor (Andy Beshear--remember that name) is smart and careful.

But the truth is that life for me has changed, as it has of course for all of us.  And what, I query, is the role of blogging in the strange, weird and frightening world where we now live?    For me blogging was always about things I did, places I went, books I read.  In pandemic-Louisville,  I didn't do anything--unless you count reading (and in some cases re-reading old) mysteries and other books that don't require a lot of concentration, and watching too much TV.  I have friends who are documenting their time in quarantine on FB.  One of my friends, Donna, who has a second house in France, would always write a  summary of what she and her husband did (and ate) each day they were there; it was like living vicariously in France.  Now she's back in Texas and also documenting what she's doing, reading, eating, etc.  Somehow she manages to make the daily detail sound interesting and funny.  I am in awe of her, because I can't imagine how to turn the tedium of ordinary life into a daily series of interesting anecdotes.

We are now in Michigan in our little house in the UP and life is much better here.  We have outside, which we lacked in Louisville except for walks.  We have a lake and beautiful scenery.  My concentration has returned, and I can read all kinds of books again. There is very little virus here so far because the UP was virtually isolated during the winter, but it is appearing and people are vigilant because of the lack of healthcare infrastructure.  Nevertheless, we have four friends whom we can socialize with.  It's a kind of three-way bubble, and we follow all the protocols: no inside gatherings, trying to keep six feet away from each another, being careful about food we share (everyone has their own salad bowl or their own appetizer tray), etc. But sadly, we have had to dis-invite all the out-of-town visitors we'd been looking forward to seeing this summer.  No company this year.

But the problems remains:  what to blog about and more fundamentally how to make a life interesting enough to record.

Here is what Tony and I have discovered for our version of life-in-the-pandemic.  We recognize that our comfortable bubbles float in a sea of horror.  The election, the protests, the disease, the way Trump is making everything worse.  And of course we continue to obsess over all this.  We try to balance it by acts of support: self-isolating and distancing, donating money, writing letters, keeping abreast. But lamenting the fact that we will not be able to travel as we usually do in the winter or worrying about living in isolation in Louisville for seven months doesn't really help.   Instead, we have tried to shape days that are marked by some kind of special pleasure.  We don't do this everyday, of course, but we do look for opportunities.  It can be as simple as having a drink together before dinner on the deck to making special meals.  (Eating and drinking play a major part in our special days.)  Reading a book together and talking about it.  (Currently we're re-reading and newly reading Hilary Mantel's Cromwell trilogy.)  Sharing meals or drinks--sitting outside and observing social distance--with our four friends is an especially great treat.  Together with the regular pleasures--swimming in the lake, walking with Cindy and Jill and  their dogs, watching DVDs with Tony after dinner--the particular pleasures that we purposefully shape are what define our lives for the moment. 

So here are some of our special pleasures. And I hope that blog posts that follow will be less introspective and more fun to read.

• My Birthday, which always comes at the lake.  Me at 72.  Presents rom Tony.  Dinner at the Harbor Haus, where we sat in a private room besides an open window. Best martinis in the Keweenaw.

• Eating at home.  Two Lake Medora traditions: pizza from the Co-Op and Chicken Medora, a weekly meal.

• Making martinis at home for a pre-dinner drink.

• More pre-dinner drinks on the deck: Aperol Spritz (memories of Europe)

• Grilling at home and al fresco dining.

• Swimming.  We have had such great summer weather, I might get up to enough strokes that I can swim across the lake.

Louisville in the Spring--From a Quaratine Perspective: Cherokee Road

Spring in Louisville is gorgeous.  Planned around the Kentucky Derby, Louisville gardens are designed to be at their floral best in early May.  The Derby is always the first Saturday in May.  But the peak of blooms coincided with the peak of the corona virus, and the Derby was cancelled.

Though its spirit lived on.

My building is on Cherokee Road, at Cherokee Triangle--a small park with a bandstand and a juried art show in the summer.  Aside from my 1980s high-rise, most of Cherokee Road is early 19th century Victorians.  Huge houses, many are now divided into condos.

I am house-bound through the pandemic as it makes it way through Kentucky.  The only time I get outside is to walk with Tony--either up and down Cherokee Road from our building to the entrance to Cave Hill Cemetery or the loop in Cherokee Park, one of our beautiful Olmstead Parks which I look out at from our windows.  It is a beautiful walk, and generally uncrowded with people being careful to social distance.  I am lucky to have it, as you may see  here.  (Note: these pictures were taken a week or so after the Derby peak, but nonetheless in the virus peak.  It feels like two different worlds).

I miss being outside!

#Louisville
#CherokeeRoad
#Quarantine

Home

We are home from Budapest.  We left a week ago, about two weeks before our scheduled departure, and, against a number of odds, we made it back in one day.  I just wanted everyone who has been following our travels to know.  Also I have several Budapest posts in draft, which I will finish up and publish.  (Because there's not going to be a lot interesting going on here.)  And if you don't like reading about the travails of travel, just skip the next part.

About three weeks ago, we started hearing news about the spread of the virus in Europe, the ban (except for American nationals) for inhabitants of the Schengen zone (a group of European countries that have open borders, Hungary being one of them) to enter the US, and the cut-back on flights from Europe to the US.  On Saturday 3/14, we read that Delta was soon suspending all flights from Europe to the US.  I tried to contact Delta--by phone, twitter, and the website--about changing our tickets.  The phone immediately put me on-hold, and I waited and waited until the call dropped.  No one answered my tweets until about 10 days later, and the modify reservation option on the website didn't work (still doesn't).  So when I read that American would be flying from Europe to the US until March 18 to help Americans get home, I made a reservation and figured I would deal with Delta when I got back to the US.

The day before we left Hungary put a ban all restaurants, etc, and closed its borders.  That night the man who was taking us to the airport the next morning called and asked if we still wanted a pickup because another US client had just gotten an email that his flight was cancelled. I frantically searched the internet but couldn't find anything.  I called and back said we would take the 5:00 am pickup.

We got just a few hours of sleep before getting up at 4:00 and starting our trek.  We got to Budapest, then to Heathrow, where we had a six hour layover.  While at Heathrow, we saw flight after flight being cancelled.  Nevertheless, we took off on time and arrived at O'Hare.  We had seen pictures of the massive crowds at ORD the days before and read tales of people being crammed up together and standing on line for 7+hours. We only had a 90 minute layover in Chicago that we were so sure we would not make that I had booked us a non-refundable room at the ORD airport.

When we arrived in Chicago there were virtually no lines at all.  We got through immigration, through the mandatory health check and temperature taking, collected our bags and delivered them to the transfer point, went through security, caught a bus to take us around the airport to another terminal, found our gate, and boarded our flight.  I was astonished; 90 minutes is a tight connection at the best of times.

So we are home.  We are in a loose quarantine for two weeks (stay home, but can go to grocery store, pharmacy of walk outside, which is pretty much what all of Louisville is doing right now.).  Like everyone else we are scared: how quickly everything changed, how dire the prospects are, how terrifying it is to have a president who doesn't believe in science.

We are also worried for our friends in Budapest and are wondering what we will find if we go back next year.

Delta for all its vaunted no worries about changing or cancelling flights, will only refund us the return trip in miles, which we must use before October.  Fat chance of that happening.  And I will probably have to swallow the nonrefundable hotel.  But we are SO lucky.  We are safe, we have a safe place to live, we are vigilant about our health, we wash our hands a lot.

Kiskunfelegyhaza: Extraordinary Town Hall with Zsolnay Ornaments

Kiskunfelegyhaza (if you can pronounce it you're better than me!) is a small city about an hour and a half train ride from Budapest.  It has an extraordinary Town Hall that we have long wanted to see.  So we hopped on a train and spent the day there.

Town Halls were important structures in Hungary around the turn-of-the-century.  They attested to civic identity in a country that was growing by leaps and bounds.  Kiskunfelegyhaza invited designs in 1903 but controversy greatly divided the town.  Should they keep the older classical style or build their town hall in the new Hungarian style of Odon Lechner and his followers? (There is a lot of ideology and history, as well as aesthetics, embedded into this question.)  The latter side won, and the commission was given to Jozsef Vas, who began construction in 1909.  After Vas's death, Nandor Morbitzer completed the building in 1911, adding the tower to keep the building even more in line with the Lechner school.

The building is decorated with Transylvanian folk motifs, including flowers, hearts and a multi-colored roof.

The inside was attractive as well, but paint obviously doesn't hold  up in the way the technology of the external Zsolnay tiles does. 

Later we got to see the façade in the slanting late afternoon sun, making the colors glow differently and the ornaments almost three-dimensional in appearance.

There were some other interesting buildings in this little city, but the Town Hall is clearly the star of the show.

Here for example is a building decorated with small tiles.  The little round decorations are drawn from Transylvanian embroidery knots.  

 A beehive on the top of a building, signifying this was once a bank (bees storing honey is an image of "saving.")

More little dots.

 And a perfect Art Nouveau railing.

#Kiskunfelegyhaza

#HungarianTownHall

#Zsolnay