Coincidentally, when I was undertaking my walks across the Budapest cemeteries in search of Rusyns buried there, I got an invitation to take part in the presentation of the new book “Walks along Cemeteries” subtitled as a book on “Budapest cemeteries and prominent Rusyn and Subcarpathian personalities’ graves.” The book was written by Rita Szilágyi, a historian, tour guide and the author of several books about Budapest cemeteries, and published in Hungarian and Rusyn by the Terézváros (one of Budapest’s city districts) Rusyn Self-Government.
Rita Szilágyi guides her readers through seven cemeteries of Hungary’s capital city, noting the graves of “church figures, public activists, academics, artists and actors,” some of whom became world famous, while others were known in narrow circles only. Not all of them were ethnic Rusyns, but they all (or their families) came from Subcarpathia or the Prešov Region.
The author recounts about 18 graves (some of which are family sepulchres) at the Fiumei (Kerepesi) Cemetery, 18 graves at the Farkasréti Cemetery, two graves at the Jewish Cemetery at Kozma Street, and one grave each at Óbuda, Rákoskeresztúr, Rákospalota and Farkasréti Jewish Cemeteries. My essays about Sándor Bonkáló and Antal Hodinka are available on this website, so let us touch upon some interesting and probably little-known facts about the Rusyns or persons of Subcarpathian origin listed in Rita Szilágyi’s book. In this essay, we will stroll along the Rusyn graves of the Fiumei Cemetery.
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In the centre of the Artists Parcel at the Fiumei Cemetery established in 1928, next to the grave of Mihály Munkácsy (1844–1900), a great Hungarian painter and probably the best-known native of Mukachevo (Munkács), stands the grave of Tivadar Kosztka Csontváry (1853–1919). Tivadar was born in Kisszeben (now Sabinov, Prešov region, Slovakia), but in 1865 their family moved to Szerednye (Serednie, Transcarpathia, Ukraine) to his mother’s relatives. Later Tivadar Kostka studied at the Ungvár Royal Main Gymnasium, and then worked as a pharmacist.
He decided to become an artist at the age of 37, in 1880. It happened as he sat by the door of the pharmacy he worked in for a short rest and suddenly decided to draw the oxen-driven cart that was standing nearby in the street on the reverse side of a doctor’s medical prescription sheet. When the chemist saw his drawing, he exclaimed: “Well, you were born to become an artist!” And then Kostka had a vision and heard a voice saying, “You will be the world’s biggest painter of the way of light.” Often his paintings were very large; they are said to be supertemporal, symbolic and full of the mysterious or bizarre atmosphere (Great Tarpatak in the Tatras, The Ruins of the Greek Theatre at Taormina, The Lonely Cedar). Kostka earned some success abroad, but in Hungary, he was considered mental and his works were not recognized. In 1900, Kostka acquired the pseudo Csontváry (in fact, it was a ‘translation’ of his Slav family name – csont in Hungarian and kostka in Slav languages mean bone, and -váry means ‘of the castle’ with a ‘noble’ possessive ending).
Csontváry died in 1919, during the period of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, most probably of hunger.
Fortunately, in 1919 the architect Gedeon Gerlóczy saw his works prepared for an auction to be sold as sackcloth, bought and preserved them – and even lived to see the first posthumous exhibition of Csontváry’s works in 1963.
Probably, the most striking example of Csontváry’s works is The Old Fisherman: while at first sight, the only unusualness in the picture is the dissymmetry of the fisherman’s face, if you put a mirror in the middle of the painting you will see two opposite faces and opposite sceneries – the fisherman prays in a boat on a calm sea (mirrored on the left side), and the devil sits in a coffin with a stormy sea behind him (mirrored on the right side).
https://kozepsuli.hu/elkepeszto-dolog-van-elrejtve-csontvary-egyik-kepeben/
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When strolling along the alley of fashionable hotels lined along the Danube embankment, you would not miss a life-size sculpture of Ignác Roskovics (1854–1915), a Hungarian church and genre artist of Rusyn origin. It is interesting that there exist two identical sculptures of Roskovics – in Budapest and in Uzhhorod, both crafted by Mykhailo Kolodko, a recognized master of miniature sculptures also scattered over Budapest and Uzhhorod.
https://szallas.hu/programok/roskovics-ignac-szobra-budapest-p7545#image-1
Ignác Roskovics also reposes at the Fiumei Cemetery. His gravestone represents a modest obelisk with a three-crossbeam cross (with the horizontal lower beam which is often found on tops of Greek Catholic churches in Transcarpathia, differing from what is considered to be the Orthodox three-crossbeam cross that has a slant lower beam; however, such differentiation must be quite recent, for in Galitzia / Halychyna some old Greek Catholic churches are crowned with the cross with a slant lower beam, and the same cross is found on the old Greek Catholic gravestones there).
Ignác Roskovics was an illustrator of the 21-volume encyclopaedia, The Austrian-Hungarian Monarchy in Word and Picture (1886–1901). He did nearly all illustrations of Subcarpathia for that encyclopaedia. By the way, the editor-of-chief of this grand work was Mór Jókai (1825–1904) who is considered ‘the greatest Hungarian Romanticist’ (he is also buried at the Fiumei Cemetery). As a deputy of the Hungarian Parliament, Mór Jókai stood for the improvement of the economic conditions in the regions inhabited by Rusyns, which ultimately was embodied by Ede Egán’s Verkhovyna / Highlands Program in 1897.-
It is worth noting Roskovics’s religious activity. He was a member of the Greek Catholic Religious Council and Sub-Chairman of the State Greek Catholic Commission, and his painting Virgin Mary as Hungary’s Patroness appeared on the cover of the petition submitted by Hungarian Greek Catholics in 1900 to Pope asking him to let them administer Liturgies in Hungarian rather than Old Slavonic (as a consequence of Magyarization of the everyday life of Hungarian Greek Catholics; the request was ultimately satisfied, and in 1912 68 parishes of the south-western part of the Munkács Eparchy were subordinated to the newly established Hajdúdorog Eparchy). Roskovics made decorations for the interiors of a number of Greek and Roman Catholic churches throughout historical Hungary – now in Ukraine, Slovakia, Romania and Serbia. He crafted the side altar of St. Adalbert for St. Stephan’s Basilica in Budapest.
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The 12 bronze apostles on the main entrance door of St. Stephan’s Basilica were crafted by another sculptor of Rusyn descent, Ede (Ödön) Szamovolszky (1878–1914). It is noteworthy that Szamovolszky received that order when he was just 24 years old. He was born in Nagyberezna (Velyky Berezny, Transcarpathia, Ukraine) and studied in Ungvár and Budapest. In 1900, he was a member of the pilgrimage of Hungarian Greek Catholics to Rome to ask for permission to hold Liturgies in Hungarian. Szamovolszky died at the age of 36, as a World War I conscript, from pneumonia, and reposed at the Fiumei Cemetery beneath a modest black plaque.
https://epa.oszk.hu/03300/03313/00006/pdf/EPA03313_gorogkatolikus_szemlelet_2018_2_068-071.pdf
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Now it is the turn of the Farkasréti Cemetery, also known as the “Most vast and best-located burial site in Budapest.” Many renowned personalities found their last resting place here, in the Artists Parcel and the Hungarian Academy of Science Parcel.
Here lies Andriy (András) Bródy (1941–2021), an artist whose portraits combined Rusyn traditions with West European expressionism. His father, Andriy Bródy Sr. (1895–1946), was the first Prime Minister (October 11–26, 1938) of the autonomous Subcarpathian Rus institutionalized after the Munich Agreement and adoption of the new Czechoslovakian constitution, a representative of the Russophile movement, the leader of the Autonomous Agrarian Union and a deputy of the Czechoslovakian parliament. Just two weeks after his appointment as Prime Minister, he was arrested “for high treason,” but in February 1939 he was freed and soon fled to Hungary. In 1939–1944 (when Subcarpathia was again part of Hungary), Andriy Bródy Sr. was the leader of the group of Subcarparthian deputies to the Hungarian Parliament. With the advance of the Soviet Army, he refused to emigrate to the USA, though a plane was waiting for the Hungarian deputies to take them overseas. In 1945, he was arrested by the Soviet authorities and a year later executed “for collaboration with the Horthy regime.” In 1991, he was rehabilitated in the newly independent Ukraine “due to a lack of evidence.”
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It would be difficult to find the gravestone of Arnold Duliskovich (1884–1933), a landlord, politician, and Chief Inspector of the Hungarian Royal Frontier Police. He was born to the family of a Greek Catholic priest in Bányafalva (now Babychi, Transcarpathia, Ukraine). He spoke as a witness at the Máramarossziget Trial on treason charges of Ruthenians who wanted to shift to Orthodoxy in 1913–1914; then, in 1918, he attempted to organize an independent Rusyn military unit meant to protect Subcarpathia. When the region became part of Czechoslovakia, Duliskovich relocated to Hungary and took up journeys abroad to advocate the concept of Subcarpathia’s being part of Hungary.
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Atanáz Fedinecz (1936–2012) was a known nuclear medicine physician, artist and an active member of the Rusyn community in Hungary. He was born in Mukachevo, graduated from Uzhhorod University, and lived in Hungary from 1980.
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Nándor Plotényi (1844–1933), born in Nagyláz (Velyki Lazy, Transcarpathia, Ukraine), was a renowned violinist and pianist, an artist of the National Theatre Orchestra, and co-performer of Ferenc Liszt and Johannes Brahms. Starting from 1880, he lived in his native village where he built a castle, laid a botanical garden with exotic plants, and established a distillery and a winery. In Uzhhorod, he founded a music school.
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Regretfully, in 1970 the grave of Hiador Sztripszky (1875–1946), a prominent Rusyn ethnographer, linguist, and literature historian, ceased to exist because the Artists Parcel was arranged in that part of the Farkasréti Cemetery. Now we can only state that it had been located somewhere amongst the contemporary graves of renowned opera singers.
Hiador Sztripszky was born in Selesztó (now Shelestovo, Transcarpathia, Ukraine) to the family of a Greek Catholic priest. He studied in Ungvár, at the Faculty of Philosophy of Budapest University, graduated from Kolozsvár (now Cluj-Napoca, Romania) University, and got a Ph.D. degree in Ethnography. He collected ethnographic material in Transylvania, and in 1910 began to work at the Department of Ethnography of the National Museum in Budapest. In 1918–1919, during the first Hungarian Republic, he worked for the Ministry of National Minorities where he worked for Rusyn schooling. In 1922, the Ministry was liquidated, and Sztripszky became a retiree at the age of 47. Since then, he worked as an official translator and interpreter of Slavic languages. In 1941, he joined the Subcarpathian Society for Science founded by Antoniy Hodinka, where he worked for the Department of Rusyn Language and Literature.
Sztripszky’s epistolary heritage included, mainly, works on the ethnography of Rusyns and other Slavonic ethnic groups, and the history of national schooling. Back in 1907, he wrote the book, Lajos Kossuth in Ruthenian Folk Poetry. He studied the influences under which the Rusyn national culture had been developing, the history of book publishing, and the history of literature. He also wrote poems and short stories in the Rusyn vernacular. Hiador Sztripszky was a full member of the Shevchenko Scientific Society, Ukraine (he cooperated with Ivan Franko and Volodymyr Hnatiuk, the author of the Ethnographic Materials from Ugric Ruthenia), and of the Romanian Academy of Science.
His political views were rather variegated: he criticized both Russophiles and Ukrainophiles supporting the development of the literary Rusyn language based on live local dialects but kept loyalty to the Hungarian State. During WWI, he edited the Ukránia magazine published in Budapest, and in 1919 – the Rusk0-Krainska Pravda newspaper. He wrote in Rusyn, Hungarian and Slovak under several pennames.
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Now it is time to head to Óbuda, one of the three towns that had made up the contemporary city of Budapest. At the local cemetery rests Emil Baleczky (1919–1981), a Slavonic scholar, philologist, and longstanding Associate Professor and then Head of the Chair of Russian Philology of Lóránd Eötvös University in Budapest.
Emil Baleczky was born in Zúgó (Huklyvy), in the Subcarpathian Verkhovyna (Highlands). He studied in the well-known Great Russian Gymnasium in Mukachevo, founded and maintained by Russian emigrants, then at Charles University in Prague and the Faculty of Philosophy at Budapest University. The scope of his academic studies included linguistic contact between the Russian and Rusyn languages, on one hand, and the Hungarian language, on the other hand, and cultural and historical links between them. His works on classic philology made him known as an etymologist and comparative linguist. He authored the textbook, The Old Slavonic Language, and studied the local Rusyn dialect in Komlóska which is currently one of the two remaining indigenous Rusyn villages in Hungary. He translated poems by Sándor Petőfi and Endre Ady into Rusyn.
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A Rusyn trail can also be found at the cemetery of Rákospalota, once a suburban village and now a district of Budapest. What is at issue is the grave of András Benedek Stumpf (1947–2009), a writer and art historian born in Mukachevo to the family of a Baptist pastor. As ethnic Hungarians, the Benedek family were dis-housed by the new Soviet power and resettled to Berehovo. András Benedek studied at the Chair of Hungarian Philology of Uzhhorod University, where he together with his fellow students founded the Forrás / Spring Literary Studio, and Együtt / Together literary magazine which was disseminated by typewriter.
In 1970, he and Vilmos Kovács wrote the essay, Hungarian Literature in Carpathian Ukraine. It was published in Hungary, and due to the reaction of the Soviet authorities Benedek was deprived of his future career as an author: he was conscripted into the army, and then worked as a gardener and traveling photographer. In 1976, he relocated to Hungary where he worked at Széchenyi Library, then at Gorki Library (now the State Library of Foreign Languages). The scope of his oeuvres encompassed Hungarian and Rusyn culture in Transcarpathia, and Rusyn history, literature, and ethnography.
In 2001, his monograph A gens fidelissima: a ruszinok was published in Buffalo, USA and Toronto, Canada. András Benedek was a regular author of the Rusyn press published in Hungary.
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I wanted to finish this pursuit of Rusyn trails at the Budapest cemeteries with some adventurous story. And – here it is! – Dr. Gyula Kepes (1847–1924), a member of the Austrian-Hungarian Polar Expedition in 1872–1874, was buried at the Jewish Farkasréti Cemetery.
Kepes was born in Mezővári (now Vary, Transcarpathia, Ukraine). He was the only ethnic Hungarian (at that time in Hungary a Jew meant faith and not ethnicity) participant in the expedition that discovered an unknown archipelago in the high latitudes and named it Franz Josef Land. The main goal of the expedition financed by Austrian and Hungarian nobility was to find the navigable waterway between Europe and America. As the physician of the expedition, Kepes was responsible for the health of its members and for their health-supporting menu. To avoid scurvy, he ordered those big volumes of lemon juice be mixed with Tokaji wine and then freeze the mixture. En route in Norway, preserved berries were added to this medicine. The Tegetthoff, the steamship, got frozen on the ice and was carried northwards by the currents. The members of the expedition spent two extremely harsh winters at -50° C; their food got frozen and they had to hunt for polar bears and seals to survive. Finally, they left the ship and went on foot for three months until they were taken aboard by a passing whaleboat.
Dr. Kepes deserved credit for the fact that despite the unbearable conditions, only one member of the crew died during the expedition – from TB. Upon arriving back in Norway, Kepes was the first to inform the Hungarian press about the discovery of Franz Josef Land. He was awarded the title of Honorary Citizen of the City of Munkács.
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This essay is just a brief summary of Rita Szilágyi’s book “Walks across Cemeteries,” and a kind of invitation for an interested reader to find and read this book. I mentioned here only some figures from the author’s list and tried to supplement Rita’s sketches with some facts that I thought may be interesting for our international Rusyn readership.
During the presentation of her book, Rita Szilágyi pointed out that the list of the persons of Rusyn and Subcarpathian origin buried in Budapest (and in Hungary on the whole) had to be expanded. In my opinion, it may also be worth compiling a comprehensive list of such graves – in order to pay due tribute to the memory of our compatriots who lived, worked, and were buried in Hungary.
https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=1950432955144988&set=pcb.1950447891810161
Rita Szilágyi and her book “Walks across Cemeteries.”
https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=1950433728478244&set=pcb.1950447891810161