The Hungarian Quarterly, 1996 (46. évfolyam, 177. szám)
Ignác Romsics: Letters to a Fellow Historian from Dalmatia. A Subjective Afterword to a Twentieth-Century History of Hungary
'slipped out' of his role and gave free rein to conclusions that reflect his personal opinion. Nevertheless, those are either absolutely clear-cut cases—agreeing with death sentences for mass murderers, let us say, or expressing sympathy for those who were slaughtered—or else 1 signal: Watch out here! this is the author's personal opinion, which the reader is entirely free to accept or reject. On the whole, though, 1 did strive to induce the potential reader to make up his or her own mind through a detached, yet far from ad hoc presentation of the facts. 2 I have been enjoying the Adriatic summer for three days now on the shady terrace of our rented house. In the garden before me are bushes of laurel, oleander and myrtle, well-trimmed pines, and behind them, the blue sea. To the left and right are holiday homes, several of them villas, large and small, that were built between 1890 and 1914. Crumbling as they are and awaiting renovation, they are still imposing and command respect. Mementoes of a vanished world. The same is true of Opatija, once known as Abbazia, and a dozen other places on what is now the Croatian coast. Altogether there are several hundred, maybe even thousands, of these places, including Ótátrafüred (Vysoké Tatry), a mountain resort in what used to be Upper Hungary and is today Slovakia, or Szováta (Sovata) and Tusnádfürdő (Bäile Tu§nad) in what is today Romania—in all such spa resorts, from Ischl in the Salzkammergut to Karlsbad (Karlovy Vaiy) in Bohemia and Herkulesfürdő (Bäile Herculane), there was this same elegance, hundreds of villas and hotels in the same style. How many of them were built altogether, one wonders? Fifty thousand? One hundred thousand? A huge number, to be sure, yet still negligible in relation to the 50 million inhabitants of the Habsburg Empire—at best 1-2 per cent would have been able to enjoy the aristocratic or upper-middleclass comforts that these buildings once offered their residents. So what about the other 48-49 million? Just a few minutes by motorway from the elegant sea coast, tucked in among the mountains, are tiny Dalmatian villages of ramshackle dry-stone huts with dilapidated roofs—hard to tell which are for people and which for their animals. The same contrast will strike the eyes of the traveller who drives out of Sfintu Gheorghe toward Bäile Tu§nad and turns off to Ba§anii Mici, or who takes the highway from Poprad through Vysoké Tatry on the Slovakian side of the High Tatras toward Dunajec on the Polish side, to say nothing of the villages of the Transylvanian Heath between Reghin and Cluj. That's how it was; that was the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. Vienna, Budapest, Prague and somewhere between one and two dozen other big cities rose like islands above the traditional rural world. In the cities, lighting came courtesy of gas and even electricity; in the latter, candles or possibly oil lamps. In the former, dwellings were provided with bathrooms and water closets; in the latter, people still slept with their animals. In the former, people travelled by bus and Letters to a Fellow Historian from Dalmatia 49