a journey to Esztergom
Eyeballing Slovakia on the opposite banks of the river, the enormous dome of Esztergom’s basilica is a landmark that visitors see for many kilometres before they actually reach the town. This is the nation’s largest church, appropriately situated atop Castle Hill, lording it over both the Danube and the town’s pretty pastel houses and winding streets. The highlight of the cathedral may well be its chapel, an ornate, lavish affair of red and white marble, and housing an enormous altarpiece, based on Titian's Assumption. The sweeping views from the cupola of the mighty meandering river cut through Hungary’s verdant countryside are also unforgettable.
The bus ride was much like cruising through the famous Canadian British Columbia Fraser River Valley, a series of small towns and curious sights, only it is the Danube instead of the Fraser. A journey of two hours by slow nice people filled coach. Always i kept my beads in hand, chanting names of the panca tattva constantly. Catholics must have thought me quite pious and seen my beatific smile.
Reaching Eztergom, rows of four or five story buildings looking hundreds of years old and still fully functioning exactly as they always did only with electricity and water heaters, all stone and red clay tile roofs, mostly painted yellow or cream or even a rusty red or sienna orange, ornate varied shaped windows mostly in rows, vines along many walls. Gables and windows of carved stone and looking like a cemetary grown into a city.
Way up above, an old stone fortess built on the orders of empire against the huns invading, or the Germans or etc, crumbling red stone and red colored earth, ramparts and walls and stairways up the sides. Red and cream stones laid end to end piled up like they may have taken lifetimes to construct it all. And above all this a huge dome easily five times the size of the MB legislative buildings, wih columns and stone decorations, a Catholic church looking like it descended from some insane giants heaven. Like an out of place monstrosity sitting atop thousand of years of ancient history, itself ancient . One can almost still hear the Roman troops marching the ramparts, later the Hungarians, way up in the sky. Along the sides, huge long houses in yellow paint, to house armies of scholars and Catholic priests, but nowadays just a few left. The money to build it must have cost many hundreds of families their life savings for many years. The temple looked like it was worth everything the town owned and then some, all in one massive structure from a dream.
I walked around old cobble stone lanes, beside the creek, saw a modernistic all-glass blue building stretched out muli facted, anything but square building , beside the Danube, its purpose unclear, approached through narrow ways, I came upon a garden pathway and moat
leading beside the Danube. A bridge spanned the river to Slovakia on the other side. A long low barge pushed waves in front of it as it slowly but powerfully made its way up-river and under the high steel light-blue bridge, mounted on three cement and stone buttresses eac the size of fortresses themselves. I found a wooden bench that looked like Louise-Riells
ghost lived there, ( a historic figure as old as it gets in white Canada) and an anomoluous basketball hoop just nearby, looking so oddly human. I sat and ate bread sticks and peanuts and hungarian walnuts with hot chili sauce. A red earth narrow muddy path was beside me, leading up past a peasant house over stone walls and garden built into the ruins of the old fortress, but many hundreds of feet below it. the wall was crumbling, revealing layers of bricks withinm laid by someone over a thousand yers ago...
It was cold, always cold and damp here, perfect weather if you like sore throats a lot. I leaned on my cane, knees aching, and slowly made my way around the overbearing physical presence of the high hill and ancient ruins and massive domed church. A huge white statue of some Pope could be seen, the size of many men. It took a while, an hour or so, as i made my way up cobbled streets and passed through a parking lot with buses of tourists, and found the bus stop again on the other side from which i had come, and waited to return to Szentendre.
Szentendre, an ancient artist colony,
trading and fortress town, and wine growing and church ridden town, wih Roman graves, tall church spires, cobbled streets, baroque and roccoco buildings, tourist shops, restaurants, banks, the Danube, all of them different. -no two buildings in all of Hungary are alike. Round ones, castle like ones, long houses with iron work , such iron work, like art of a schizophrenic with nothing but time on their hands. Half moon shaped windows, small oblong windows, windows with crosses set in them like churches, no two doors alike, all unique, hand carved wood, slats and litttle peep holes and tiny windows and fancy grill works and old style keys . Again, the feeling is like walking through a huge graveyard, that kind of religious stone art work, and everything artistically done, taking their time to make it fancy and speaicl, unique, stone and iron and frescoes and carved jesuses, roman numbers and letters, ancient symbols of masons and groups of wine sellers, or cloth merchants etc all with their own groups and houses and symbologies.
In all, a journey through another universe, one undreamt of by a Canadian. The taxi man pointed out some tall ornate european looking houses, describing how some Franz Josef had built this some five hundred years ago, and i remarked, "oh, modern!" and he laughed at this , liked this joke very much. And compared to the rest, a few hundred years ago is modern. Men have walked these streets for thousands of years, quite literally. The same alley where i stopped to relieve my bladder had seen many an ancient warrior drunk on the wine stop for the same purposes, no doubt.
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Szentendre büszkélkedhet jól megőrzött 18. századi barokk városkép . |
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Szentendrei Képtár |
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Out of the 9 egyházak Szentendre a barokk-rokokó görög-ortodox templom Blagovestenska a |
Rokokó iconostase Mihály Zsivkovics belül Blagovestenska templomban
Pozarevacka szerb-ortodox templom
A House of Prisoner Ráby (Rab Ráby Ház) áll a Rab Ráby tér a központ az egykori dalmát negyedévben.
Not a non white person in the whole country. i saw a black man once, and wanted to stop him and shake his hand. No sunglasses here, and i in my Canadian winter coat with sleeve protectors and deep head piece with fur, and wine color sunglasses, i looked like i had stepped in from Scotts expedition to the poles, and everyone looked discretely at me like, where did this one come from? They are used to mad artisits here, they live on them. Must be a Canadian! They smiled with embarassed amusment at my ill-pronounced Hungarian, but human needs are the same, so i was able to communicate my needs when required, it was usually obvious enough. Hungarians catch English with ease, it seems easy to them. Candian english is like no pronunciation, no accents, just chopped short and obvious. Hungarian is like everything is over pronounced, roccoco like the buildings, rounded full vowels and four kinds of "s" and four kinds of "A", and all said with a flourish like they just plain liked rolling their tongues and being ornate and rich as the marzipan chocolates. Every store has rows of bottles of the worlds best white wine for sale, like so many cans of pop, and almost as cheap. There is no such thing as peanut butter! Butter comes in small packs like 1 quarter pounds. Bread is all pastry and rich and with seeds or fancy shapes. No pies, but puffed pastry everwhere, several shops are all at the small town train station, and on every other street corner.
Even the post office sells fancy chocolates and books of poetry and art and religion. But not photocopiers, God forbid anything so practical, if it cant be eaten or enjoyed in the heart and mind like artistic books of philosophy by Sartre and Nietsche and Camus, and religous and rebellious leaders of men, or artists like Degas, and poetry everwhere, then they dont really want or need it here. God forbid the post office should have a photocopier! A local printer copied my pages for me, charged me like all of maybe one and a half cents, smiling and pleasant and very professional and efficient, German looking with white hair, glasses and mustache and nice smile. Then it took four post office employees a half hour to send the fax to Canada, after consulting several books of rules and formats, and they charged me almost a hundred dollars for this rare privilege after getting my official signature a few times on several documents and copies and official records, all done on old looking black squat fax machines. Rows of windows and stalls, punch in a code on the floor computor then take a number, overhead displays read out your number and which stall to go to for services, all delineated into categories and types and costs involved. But no photocopier.
Cute girls, smiling and laughing, so amused at the artisic looking shaved headed sunglass wearing Canadian man with cane, wanting to fax, and so happy to be able to say, yes! We can fax that for you! please wait! They were fascinated with the look of the documents, and i understood one thing they said, "oh it looks like the government!" ( my tax forms and id. ) They were so happy at their jobs, miniskirts over gym tight black slacks and loose blouses, long hair all of them, so good natured but intelligent and not so naive as one first could think at first glance. If i were a younger man, i would be fasci9nated by these good looing good natured intelligent women.
Hours there are 6 am to 2 pm, closed to 3, then back til six, quite unusually long hours. Most shops open at ten, maybe nine, some at 6 am like grocery stores, maybe not at all or half an hour late, then close at two, and may or may not open again after that for an hour or three in the afternoon. But they all read deep philosophy and are familiar wih obscure artists and all kinds of social movements and anarchy and religious leaders of times going back thousands of years... I amused myself looking at boxes of heart shaped marzipan chocolates, books of art and poetry, and modern novels converted into Hungarian, and childrens toys like plastic captain amerika, and toy cars and ponies and beads for girls, yes, sold by the Posta, office, while i waited for this wonderful faxing of a document to Canada.
Hare Krsna.
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