Hungary [antikvár]

l-let us set out from Buda. But when? In the Buda period of half a millión years ago, when the limestone caves of Buda Castle Hill were inhabited by primitive man, who had just found out how to make fire, and whose neck bone and footprint in the petrified mud at Vértesszólős in Western Hungary caused a worldwide sensation, since for a time his were the remains of the oldest known man in Europe? Or when in the civilian town of Aquincum, on the very borders of the Barbarian world, the water-organ was played by a Román lady, perhaps the daughter of the procurator, or the wife or concubine of a legionary or a wellto-do citizen? Or perhaps fifteen hundred years ago, when Attila the Hun, Scourge of God, pitched his tent on the slope that concealed the walls of Aquincum's smaller, civilian amphitheatre? Or eleven hundred years ago, when Prince Árpád's Magyars-resembling the Huns in appearance and nature but already preparing for change-came to the ford over the great river, somewhere around the Danube Bend, where it veers from East to South, towards the Balkans? For they forded or swam across it with their horses to cast their pagan eyes on Pannónia, alsó part of the Carpathian Basin where this Eastern people, nomadic in tradition but soon to become founders of a state, settled down for good. Or shall we set out five hundred years ago, when Matthias Corvinus, proclaimed king on the ice of the Danube, was building Renaissance palaces, gathering Humanists at his court and bombarding the workshops of Italy with orders for codices for his Bibliotheca Corviniana? One could pick the period between f541 and 1686, when the Turkish crescent flew for a century and a half from the towers of Buda Castle, when one of its great churches was a mosque and another the stables of the spahis. Or the revolutionary months of 1848-49, aflame with national feeling. Or the year 1867, when the Austrians and the Hungarians struck a compromise that created the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy-in economic terms almost the forerunner of European integration today. Or less than fifty years ago, when the remnants of SS General Pfeffer-Wildenbruch's army, trapped in the limestone caves of Castle Hill, tried to break out through the underground passages from the surrounding lines of the Red Army, which then stationed itself on this soil for the next half century. Or in 1956, when the people rose up, in vain for the time being, to try and change the fate which had joined the people of the Carpathian Basin again to the East, which they had once left in order to come here, to Central Europe. Let us set out from Buda. But when? A photographer bearing a camera, an implacable recorder of the truth, though it may teli enchanting legends as well, has no choice but to set out now. Or has he? Surely the logic which states that today's photograph can show only what is visible today, falls down somewhat when one adds that what one sees today is not solely the present. Our buildings and material environment, even the landscape itself, are today's and yesterday's only in part. To a degree they encompass the more recent past, the span of somé generations, the creations and props of the couple of centuries behind us. So much has remained from past centuries and even millennia, here and there intact and elsewhere faithfully reconstructed, that our lives are led among the signs of