Memoir of Hungary

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Memoir of Hungary Clare Brett Smith


A Hungary Memoir, photographs and commentary, is a mixture of recent and childhood memories, a travel portfolio, and an Aid to Artisans project report. Because of children’s stories, novels, travel accounts and movies, I already had a picture of Hungary in my mind. when I first went there in 1991, and it looked much the way I expected it to look. I was interested to see the close match between imagined Hungary and what I photographed. Perhaps it’s true that you see what you were expecting to see. Clare Brett Smith, 2012


Memoir of Hungary

Aid to Artisans 1991-1992 & Memories of Hungarian-Americans 1935 Clare Brett Smith

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Memoir of Hungary

Photographs & Text by Clare Brett Smith Library of Congress Catalogue Card Number: ISBN 978-1-4675-2510-7 Copyright © 2012 by Clare Brett Smith All rights reserved

Travel & Work Series previous titles Japan, Attention to Detail China 1977★Character Oaxaca*Mexico 1970-1979 Men&Boys/Women&Children, Pakistan Honduras, an ATA Project Senso di Posto. Italy in the 1980s Egypt, a Portfolio Ghana ★ Travel & Work & Portraits

Clare Brett Smith 80 Mountain Spring Road Farmington, Connecticut 06032 United States of America

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Memoir of Hungary

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Working with Artisans in Hungary After the fall of communism, the U.S. government made strategic grants in the former Soviet Union and its sphere for economic development, for building democracy, for job creation, for women’s empowerment and other practical goals. Aid to Artisans received a two-year grant to increase employment in the artisan sector. Increasing employent turned out to be nearly impossible. We were lucky just to save the jobs. Communism did not prepare people for finding markets, working to its demands, analyzing costs, anything that would be normal for anyone in a market economy. With only a two-year grant, and working in a country previously closed to western business, ATA had to start quickly. We enlisted a team of graduate students, volunteers from the Yale School of Management , and their skill at analysis and their ability to connect with the members of the many artisan cooperatives was very important. ATA’s most experienced design and market consultants were engaged; Docey Lewis, Jane Griffiths, Chris Costello, Kate Kerr among them, and we had the good fortune to work with Carol and Leve Karvacy. Leve had escaped from Hungary during the Communist takeover, and became a successful engineer here in America. Carol, his American

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wife, loved all things Hungarian, and was determined to revive and honor traditional Hungarian crafts. The Karvacys, novices at first, began to import textile products for their Sandor Collection, and turned to ATA for, as Carol desribed it, “coaching”. Now managed by their son, the company is well-known and respected for its unique combination of preservation and innovation. The ready market they provided was crucially important. Judy Espinar of the Clay Angel in Santa Fe and Carol Lewitt of Ceramica did the same for pottery. For ATA it was a revelation to discover that so much fine craftsmanship still existed. The cooperatives had remarkable archives, well-trained artisans, and a broad tradition in folk art. Hungary had also been known for its sophisticated Art Deco design between the two world wars. What was completely missing in 1991 was a link to open markets. Indeed, we usually found a disbelief in their value. Looking back, it’s a pleasure to remember how much we were able to accomplish. Hungary was more than a project.. It felt very familiar and strangely dear to me , as you’ll see in the pictures that follow. Clare Brett Smith, April 2012


A bronze jester perched on the Danube riverside promenade . That’s what I thought it was, but it’s known as The Little Princess. Sadly, one of the peaks on the cap has broken off since I took this picture in 1991. 5


View from Buda across the Danube to Pest (the same view I recently saw in the opening frames of the movie, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy) 6


A clearer view of Parliament 7


Szentendere 8


These buildings on Castle Hill, pockmarked by gunfire, had not yet been repaired 9


Kids in Budapest were already up to date with cellphones 10


Hula hoops and wrought iron signage in Budapest

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Look-alikes on Castle Hill

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Thermal baths in Budapest

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Senior bench in the park near the U.S. Embassy

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Beautiful bronze door to a shoe store in Budapest 15


ATA’s program was an economic development program, but it involved more than just improving incomes. Converting to a market economy was the first challenge, but we knew it was important for us to understand the recent and not-so-recent history of the country, its glories and its troubles, its sense of identity.

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Rural Hungary, the “Old Country” Hungary was a familiar part of my Connecticut childhood. Hungarians farmed the agricultural complex that my grandfather, George Brett, assembled in Fairfield in the 1920s. Grandfather was not a famer, he was a publisher in New York, but he loved the land and bought up existing farms, about 400 acres in all, on Greenfield Hill, and hired Hungarian immigrants, farmers in the old country, to run them. John and Tessie Zold, David Biro, John Fehr - they were part of a large community of Hungarians that had settled in Bridgeport after World War I. When, in 1992, I photographed the Hungarian farmer below, it was as if John Zold with his rusty-red moustache and grumpy ways had suddenly reappeared. It was, in its way, a model farm, and I wish I had paid more attention. My father, Richard Brett, was assigned the job of overseeing the farms on weekends, and I sometimes went on his rounds with him, though he too was a publisher during the week. The Greenfield Land and Investment Company, as it was called, included dairy barns with Guernsey and Jersey cows, plow horses and riding horses, turkeys and chickens, pigs, vegetable gardens, a windmill, ponds and an icehouse. cornfields and a corn crib, hayfields, orchards , vegetable and flower gardens, a stone quarry, woodlots, and even a pinedum, and woods filled with warblers and wildflowers in spring. My sister and I had the run of the place. We didn’t learn much about farming. We didn’t milk the cows, weed the garden, cut ice from the ponds, but, like all children, we absorbed a lot and loved it. (I still like farms, brooks and ponds, meadows and orchards, more than wilderness.)

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Hungarian farm “Still Life” 18


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Springtime in the Hortabagy 20


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Shepherd, Hortabagy 22


.......and his flock 23


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Family farm, Holloko

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Farmers, old ....

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......and young 29


Married for many years 30


Lake Balaton 31


Goose Farm, Hortobagy

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Plucking goose down 33


Paprika drying in the eaves

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Pig Walk, Holloko

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Vintner 36


Weekend camps in the vineyards 37


These miniature houses, dug into the earth, were actually wine cellars. 38


Farm horse and wagon 39


Team of carriage horses in the countryside 40


- and in town, a different pair 41


Black Beauty 42


Horses The Engish writer/adventurer, Patrick Leigh Fermor, wrote about the Great Plains of Hungary in his book, Between the Woods and the Water. It’s part if a trilogy, an account of his trip from England to Constantinople. (He wrote it many years after the adventure. We have that in common, at least, as I am only getting around to these photographs decades after I took them.). He was eighteen in 1933 when he set off to walk across Europe. He borrowed a horse in Hungary for the rest of the journey and was welcomed by countless countesses in country estates and castles all the way to what he insisted on calling Constantinople, not Istanbul. In the vast expanse of Hungarian grassland, a horse was a focal point in more ways than one. Hungary’s horsemen, men of the bold nomadic Magyar tradition, men like 20th Century Hussars, at right, belong on horses. In the Great Plains trick riders, csikos, can ride five horses at once from a stand up position. ( I counted twenty horse legs in my photograph on page 48.)

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The Great Plains, the “Puszta”

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Where the Magyars rode 45


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The winds are fierce out in the Great Plains. Barns are dug into the earth and heavily thatched. 50


Inside one of the huge horse barns 51


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A softer side of Hungary 53


Coffee house waitress 54


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Museum in Kalocsa

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Judit’s shop on Castle Hill

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Sales staff and doorman at Judit’s

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Embroidery on striped ticking

Cross Stitch

Starch bath for Kalocsa lace

Kalocsa lace & eggs in a Budapest store 59


Making lace in Kiskunhalas 60


The lace maker’s tools 61


Embroidered vest (mine). The black wool body fell victim to moths, so the embroidery is now surrounded by purple velvet (mothproof).

An old embroidered linen pillow case

Street vendors from Transylvania, once a part of Hungary, now Romanian 62


Felt

Walking the famous shopping street, the Vaci Utca in Budapest,, you might think Hungary invented kitsch. I’ve never seen so many decorated eggs, so many hearts and flowers. Docey’s prize, a jug-shaped felt wall hanging has it all, including costumed dolls in a kangaroo pocket.

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Success in the U.S. Market By 1997 cut felt design had become popular in the U.S., largely through designer Gay Ellis and her Vermont company, Samii Imports. Gay developed decorative panels with artisans in Hungary and brought the pieces to contract sewers in Vermont. The Vermont factory had been idle, the Swiss company making skiwear having moved its production elswhere, and the skilled sewers were out of work The young girl and her mother on the Cuddledown catalogue cover wear fleece coats and hats of recycled material with handmade Hungarian additions. The new global economy requires flexibility, but it is often complicated. A year or two later the felt factory in Hungary closed. The artisans had to search for a new source and negotiate a tariff-free re-export exemption as wel l as competitive pricing..

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Many Hungarian towns have small museums, filled with folk art, costumes and ceramics. In Debrecen the section devoted to shepherds exhibited elaborate felt coats. Gay Ellis,. right, developed coats for non-shepherds, American women and children..

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Traditional felt applique was cut by hand for these pillows. On the Christmas stocking, left, the design was copied from a lace pattern in Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts collection, therefore appropriate for the museum shop. Artisan workshops, given enough lead time, proved to be adept at this kind of custom work, and ATA designers frequently worked to customer specifications. It was good deal for everyone.

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Felt can also be cut with a hammer and special chisel. In a workshop in Nadudvar, Docey Lewis and Jane Griffiths inspect felt bottle covers intended as gift wrap for Hungary’s Tokay wine, a local gift wrap, probably too specialized for export..

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Pottery

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Farmhouse clay hearth 69


Ceramic tiles on a roof and facade in the town center, Kiskinfelghazy 70


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Istvan Rusoi is best known for his green tile stoves. We couldn’t help but wonder if this was the same green glaze that, as we found in Mexico, is heavy with toxic lead, but he reassured us during our conversation in his kitchen, right.

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Zsilinzki’s pottery is known for its pierced work. 74


Janos Szernas

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Anne-Marie Biro and her work


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Potters Horvath and Posner and their daughter. Posner’s work is opposite, upper right, and his wife, Horvath, made the bowls at lower right. 78


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Lajos and Agnes Kovats are known for very fine traditional Hungarian black pottery

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Lajos Kovats

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Busi Lajos and his work

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Lazlos with his wife, and, right, his delicately decorated pottery and Pal Bujnyiak and Jane Griffiths admiring his work.

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Leaving the home and workshop of Gundal Istvan with our guide and interpreter, Ildiko, and, on the opposite page, examples of his elaborate ceramic pieces. 84


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Most of the potters we visited were prize-winning artists, but there are factories in Hungary for production too. This was a majolica factory. It’s easy to see that pottery is physical labor as well as art. Wet clay is very heavy.

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Kinga Szabo’s work is as elegant as she is.. Admired throughout Europe, she is a prolific artist as well as a designer for the famous Zsolnay porcelain works.. ATA was fortunate to persuade her to design some everyday earthenware for export. 87


Kinga Szabo with two of her unique bird platters

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In her family home 89


Left, another original bird platter, and right, Kinga’s designs for export

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Kaposvar pottery factory

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Szucs Imre, his pottery and the wood supply for his kiln. 92


Szucs Imre’s rustic rooster teapot 93


Appendix THE GOOD MASTER, Viking Press, 1935: Written and illustrated by Kate Seredy, herself of Hungarian descent, this was one of my favorite childhood books. It was written for boys and girls 8 - 10. ME! In 1936 I was eight years old and transported by books. I imagined myself like Kate in full skirt and bodice, even though I had only short pigtails at the time. (I’m sure Kate’s costume was the reason I loved the square dance dirndls at Putney School a few years later). I brushed my teeth with the scruffed end of a fresh birch twig, like Jansi. And I longed to gallop across the Great Plains of Hungary. I lost my copy of the book, but my friend, Mary Garland, found a well-worn one for me in a New Hampshire second-hand bookstore. My daughter, Francie , came in just as I was writing this note and sang out with delight , as she too had loved this book as a child.

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Appendix

A few of the ATA team members Carol Karvacy with her brother in law, Balo, and Clare Chris Costello, Jane Griffiths, Pal Bujnyik at Szuc Imre’s Burge inside St. Matthias Church ATA’s first visit on a porch in Pecs Docey proving she could weave as well as they (or better) Judith, Charles and Elizabeth from Yale SOM

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St. Matthias Church detail


Lace from Kiskunhalas

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2012 Clare Brett Smith



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