Europe

by Jan Morris

  33 Psychotocracy

  Romania’s Communist despotism had been different in kind from those in Warsaw, Budapest, Sofia, Prague or East Berlin. It was a Latin autocracy, it was often at odds with the Soviet Union, and it was presided over by a pair of psychotics, Ceauşescu and his all-but-illiterate wife being more like crazed tyrants of the old Orient than normal Stalinists. They had destroyed whole villages by the hundred. They had planned to drain the marvellous Danube delta, one of Europe’s great havens of wildlife, uproot all its vegetation, and turn it into paddy-fields. Even more than the recidivism of Hungarians, even more than historical grievances or Ottoman legacies, even more than the Trans-Dniester issue, even more than the Gypsies! the ghosts of this appalling couple still muddled and muffled the affairs of the country. An entire generation had grown up under their twenty-two-year aegis, and it showed.

  I had assumed the fall of the Ceauşescus to be something definitive in Romanian history, like the collapse of the Berlin Wall – the end of dreams and nightmares, the opening of the road to the prosaic. Once in the country, I was not so sure. Ceauşescu’s follies seemed to have become organic to the place: perhaps it was the nature of Romania to absorb everything, spewing out nothing, simply adding even the wildest excess or improbability to its historical repertoire, or storing it away in a tunnel. For example, an immense boulevard, two or three miles long, had been intended to form the central axis of Ceauşescu’s infamous new Bucharest, one of the supreme megalomaniac monuments of history. It was still unfinished in 1994 (all its myriad fountains were dry), but already parts of it were being humanized by trees, shops and the general flotsam and commotion of city life, so that I could imagine it in another twenty years being as essential to the flavour of Bucharest as the boulevards of the city’s Francophile past. Even the vast palace which crowned Ceauşescu’s capital was becoming familiar, if hardly homely. Its scale and ugliness was inexpungible, of course. If the Vittorio Emanuele monument in Rome were to be magnified twenty or thirty times, it would have no more civic clout than Bucharest’s Parliament Palace (née Palace of the People, a.k.a. Palace of the Ceauşescus). In living and working space the building was surpassed only by the Pentagon: in sheer volume only by a rocket-assembly hangar at Cape Canaveral and the Pyramid of Quetzalcoatl in Mexico. It wasn’t finished, either, yet it seemed to me that people were already accepting it as part of the municipal furniture. Tourists were taken there, conferences were held in its immense salons, and both houses of Parliament were expected to move in one day. When I left the building one afternoon I noticed curled up beside the ceremonial doors, which were guarded by milling soldiers and security people, an elderly dog snoozing in the chill sunshine. It looked perfectly at home.

  34 Shrines and symbols

  Over the Danube is Bulgaria, whose recent history has been, by and large, one long record of difficulty and frustration, geography having placed it between two of the most uncomfortable neighbours on earth. Russia was traditionally Bulgaria’s protector – ‘Grandfather Ivan’ – finally bestowing upon it a particularly distasteful Stalinist regime; Turkey was traditionally its oppressor, occupying the country for several centuries and intermittently indulging in massacres. In the twentieth century Bulgaria has experienced nothing but trouble – despotisms of one kind and another, defeat in the Balkan War of 1913, humiliation in the First World War, unfortunate alliance with the Nazis in the Second, the Russian ‘liberation’ of 1944, the long years of Communist autocracy, remembered by the world at large in eerie images of poisoned umbrellas, hired assassins and the brutally forced Bulgarization of minorities.

  It was only during the 1990s that the Bulgarians, a charming people that nearly everyone likes, achieved the freedom to be themselves. When I travelled around the country during the hiatus between Communism and whole-hog capitalism – when the collective farms lay in ruins but the battery hens had not yet arrived, when the party headquarters had been turned into a cinema but the mausoleum of Georgi Dimitrov, the father of Bulgarian Communism, had not yet become an art gallery – when I made my journey then it became a journey from one national shrine to another, through rings of pride and defiance. Such monuments of fortitude and National Revival! Such images of brave Bulgarian lions! Such museums of sacrifice and revolution! Such cenotaphs, mausoleums and tombs of poets and soldiers! Such monasteries of patriotic faith! Such statues of heroes, churches of thanksgiving, sites of brief-lived constituent assemblies! No patriot on earth is more patriotic than a patriotic Bulgar, and nothing is more symbolic than a Bulgarian symbol.

  An enormous hilltop cenotaph, the Freedom Monument, commemorates the most fateful event in modern Bulgarian history, the battle of the Shipka Pass. It stands high in the Balkan Mountains in the very heart of the country, embellished with the mightiest and best-fed of all the Bulgar lions. The battle was actually an episode in the Russo-Turkish war of 1877, but it resulted directly from the great Bulgarian rising against the Turks in the previous year, which was put down with such savagery that all Europe was horrified. The Russians went so far as to intervene on behalf of the Bulgarians, and the victory won among the snows of Shipka led eventually to the independence of Bulgaria. There are plenty of memorials to the Russian sacrifices of the battle, but the Freedom Monument easily caps them all. Was it not the Bulgarian contingent, after all, which really won the day, ‘supported’, as my Bulgarian history bravely says, ‘by not very many Russians’? An almost constant stream of schoolchildren climbs the 894 steps to the cenotaph of Shipka, a little vague I dare say about the strategy and even the participants in the battle, but left in no doubt that it was a famous victory of their own.

  35 Loyalty in the rain

  One day I was caught in a torrential rainstorm in the very heart of Bulgaria, Aleksandâr Nevski Square in the capital, Sofia. How the rain pelted down, making the green gardens soggy, making the paving-stones shine, dripping off the leaves of the trees all around, streaming down the gaudy ceramic tiles of the Holy Synod building and the golden domes of the cathedral! In a flash the pedestrians vanished into shelter, and only a few cars cautiously navigated their way through the downpour in the streets around the square. I fled myself, this way and that in search of somewhere dry, until I reached the doors of the church of Sveta Sofia. This is a very holy little place. It was built in the sixth century, and gave its name to the city itself. Inside I found two nuns and a young priest, chatting there in the shadows, and they dragged out a kitchen chair for me, and invited me to join them. Icons shone around us. The old brick church was dark and echoing. The rain drummed on the roof and splashed against the doors. I spoke no Bulgarian. The nuns and the priest spoke nothing else. We sat there benevolently smiling at one another, now and then nodding or shyly laughing, until the rain seemed to be dying away at last. I said my thanks and goodbyes, and walked back into the square. The storm was passing away towards the mountains, rumbling. Around the corner, soaked to the skin, his clothes hanging dank around him, his hat all floppy with water, an elderly man was standing still and silent before the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

  36 Nazdrave!

  Cherishing a decided weakness for the Bulgarians myself, I heartily sympathize with all these emotions, and am as stirred as anyone by the Freedom Memorial, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and all the tales of patriotic derring-do. Every people needs its moments of romantic ecstasy, to make up for its miseries, and even in the late 1990s Bulgaria’s troubles did not seem to be over yet. The countryside looked lovely, the wine was delicious, flowers were everywhere, waiters shyly smiled, geese, goats and donkeys roamed the purlieus of picturesque villages, truckers’ halts served nourishing soups, the package-tour resorts on the Black Sea thrived; but most people were extremely poor still, politics sounded murky and economics unreliable. Of course the Bulgarians wanted shrines and symbols! Who wouldn’t? Often enough they went far back into their history to find them, into the rich hazy world of proto-Bulgars, Thracians and Bogomils, and the most apposite of all thei
r patriotic icons, to my mind, was one of these. Above the village of Madara, with a railway station that suggested to me something to be blown up by Lawrence of Arabia on the Hejaz Railway, in the cliffs above the dusty hamlet there was carved an antique figure. So old was it, and so eroded, that you could discern it only when the setting sun caught its outline, and no more than vaguely even then. But in photographs you could see more clearly the Horseman of Madara, and realize how relevant he was to the condition of his country. There he rode, indomitable if only just recognizable. He had a jolly greyhound at his heels, and appeared to have lately slaughtered some wild beast. With his right hand he grasped the reins of his prancing horse, but his left hand was raised exuberantly high above his head, and in it he was holding a wine-cup. ‘Nazdrave!’ the Madara Horseman cried to history – ‘Cheers!’ And ‘Nazdrave!’, down the centuries, Bulgaria had loyally cried back.

  37 The wrong story

  Just as I drove away, on page 68, to my war in the Middle East, the people of Budapest rose in arms against their awful Communist Government. As we said heartlessly at the time, two great stories broke simultaneously, and I went to the wrong one. The Suez adventure turned out to be hardly more than a squalid and ignominious expression of pique: the Hungarian Rising was the most tragically heroic event of the entire Cold War between capitalism and Communism.

  Budapest was just the place for it. It does not seem to me a very lovely city, as the tourist brochures claim, but it is made for glory. On the right bank of the Danube is piled the old capital of Buda, with its royal castle and cathedral resplendent at the top; on the left bank extends the mass of Pest, all grand boulevards, parks and church steeples, running away to the horizon in a flatland of suburbs, and fronted on the river bank by the grotesque and mighty Parliament. Six bridges connect the two halves of Budapest, and the whole city suggests to me a figure of lapidary pride, commemorating always the sieges, battles, rebellions and miscellaneous splendours of its history. By and large modern Hungarians may look about as ordinary as the rest of us, but in my romantic way I like to fancy in them the spirit of the Magyar horsemen who ride in sculpted bronze about the national memorial in Heroes’ Square: haughty magnificent noblemen, ineffably proud on their caparisoned horses as they ride at a leisurely pace into the city, their kingly leader looking majestically in front of him, his companions glaring this way and that from beneath their feathered helmets like presidential security men. And in 1956, as it happened, my fancy proved to be true: the people of Budapest, ancients to schoolchildren, rose in fury against their oppressors as to the Magyar manner born.

  How I would love to have been there! Within a month a thousand Soviet tanks had viciously suppressed the Hungarian Revolution, and a whole-hog Communist Government was reinstalled. But, though the battle was tragically lost, it was the start of the winning of the war. By the time I did get to Hungary, in the 1970s, it was the first of the Communist countries of eastern Europe to be flirting with the idea of a market economy. There was talk already of a Hilton Hotel! Russian soldiers were still all over the place, still pouring off the Moscow train, still strutting about in their preposterous officers’ hats, but by the standards of Poland, Czechoslovakia or East Germany the regime was enlightened. I was astonished by the conversations of the citizenry, so risky it seemed to me then, blatantly subversive, apparently confident that life was going to get better. The diktats of Communism were brazenly disregarded. I was taken to a privately owned holiday home on Lake Balaton which might almost have been in Switzerland, and for the first time I experienced the bitter pleasure of choosing between State-owned shops and private enterprises – the first so abjectly disagreeable, the second already full of smiles and salesmanship.

  Twenty-five years on again, and I was back in Budapest for Christmas. Now the war was won. Apart from a memorial or two, there was almost nothing to remind me of the Communist years. The Hilton, so wild a promise in the old days, had been joined by four or five other international hotels, all equally luxurious. The shops were vivid, and, hard though I tried (for I missed them rather), I could find none of those grumpy white-aproned women, congenitally unable to smile, who had represented the triumph of Marxist-Leninism behind the counters of Communist Budapest. And that old air of heroism? Had it evaporated? I went to a performance of operetta pieces at the Vigadó concert hall, and for a time I thought it had. There was plenty of froth, of course, to the old melodies, plenty of Gypsy charm, but the young gentlemen of the dancing chorus seemed to me a little effete as they waltzed around the stage in white ties and tails. Presently, though, having slipped into something looser, they broke into the violent stamp and strut of the csárdás, that old display of everything most theatrically Hungarian; and then as they threw their heads back, drummed the floor, slapped their thighs, flung their arms into the air and sometimes wildly shouted, while the audience clapped to the accelerating rhythm – then I saw in them, benignly mutated, the cold sneer of the horsemen in Heroes’ Square, and the reckless style of the boys who had swarmed over the Red Army’s tanks in 1956.

  38 Bringing back the style

  One symptom of Communist relaxation, in the Budapest of the 1970s, was an emphasis on historical continuity. It is true that an official history of the capital I was given then casually dismissed the 1956 rising as counterrevolutionary, and claimed that almost at once ‘a resolution of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party analysed its causes and laid the foundation of new political measures and economic decisions’. True too that part of the Great Boulevard, Budapest’s monumental ring road, was still named for Lenin. But I was struck by the surprising attention being paid to the memory of the Habsburgs, whose kings and queens had ruled Hungary until the collapse of their empire after the First World War. Part of the Boulevard was named for Vladimir Ilyich indeed, but part was named for the Emperor Franz Josef; the yellow paintwork so characteristic of the Habsburg domains was assiduously renewed; my party cicerones made a point of directing me to cafés and restaurants which preserved some of the old imperial atmosphere – the New York Café, ineffectually renamed the Hungaria, Gerbeaud’s patisserie, the old resort of the sweet-toothed aristocracy, or Gundel’s restaurant, which had started life as the zoo restaurant but had become the very epitome of Habsburg Budapest around the turn of the century.

  In 1996 the Habsburgs and their era were even more fulsomely remembered. The New York Café and Gerbeaud’s had become among the city’s best-known tourist sites. Most of the Great Boulevard once more honoured the old monarchy. Gundel’s, for so long a fief of the Communist State, had been taken over by rich and imaginative Hungarian Americans, and was frank in its gastronomic loyalties; I did not in fact try the soup identified simply as Franz Josef’s Favourite, but I did indulge myself in a marvellously courtier-like meal consisting of Wild Suckling-Pig Soup Flavoured with Tarragon, and Count Széchenyi’s Roast Breast of Pheasant Stuffed with Hungarian Goose Liver. I felt the presence of archdukes around me as I ate, and was not surprised to read a testimonial from Otto von Habsburg himself, the dispossessed heir to the imperial monarchy, declaring that Gundel’s revival showed Hungary was ‘on the way to recovery from years of oppression, and moving towards a glorious future’. Precisely, said I to myself, indelicately burping.

  39 From The Budapest Sun, 19 December 1996

  HEIR PROMOTES EU BID

  To help promote the country’s bid to join the European Union, Hungary appointed royal heir György Habsburg Ambassador for European Integration.

  The Habsburg family, heirs to the Hungarian throne since the fifteenth century, have used their dynastic and diplomatic network to lobby for Hungary in European organizations since the political transformation of 1989.

  Habsburg is the director of MTM Communications, the largest movie production and distribution company in Central Europe.

  40 Hellenic disillusionments

  On a lovely spring day I climbed the Mouseion hill in Athens, all among the olive trees, to see the celestial view o
f the Parthenon from its summit. The morning smelt delectably of pines and flowers and dust, and my mind was full of Hellenic glories: halfway up, a Greek sprang from the bushes, opened his mackintosh wide, and revealed to me his manly equipment.

  Well, I suppose, why not? Greek art has been displaying masculine glories to us for a few thousand years. Nevertheless, on the Hill of the Muses, within sight of the Acropolis itself … I felt betrayed. My generation was brought up to think of things Greek as particularly pure and radiant, down to the Greek soldiery which had, apparently in pompoms and ballet skirts, so courageously defied both the Italians and the Germans during the war. Were the Greeks not the inventors of democracy? Were they not the fathers of poetry? To find a representative of this noble race flashing his cock to innocent tourists on the Mouseion was a sad disillusionment.

  But actually Athens had long been a come-down itself. I fear in retrospect that those Hellenic fragrances I relished on the hill were fragrances purely of the mind, because already the capital was habitually veiled in a greenish smog, swirling up from the industrial quarters of Piraeus and so thickly masking the city that sometimes the Acropolis, protruding above its vapours, looked as though it was levitating. The sentries outside the royal palace, too, were something of a disappointment to anyone of romantic fancy. Goose-stepping up and down in their full and famous finery, they looked less like soldiers of Greek myth than farm boys in drag – bulging, rather sweaty young men who might easily, I could not help thinking, in their off hours mount a performance on the hill of Mouseion.