Scenes from Budapest, Cogwheel Train

«A budapesti fogaskerekű — Budapest cogwheel train», mixed media 2012

The cogwheel train, with its toy-box red body, its bells and melodies, chugging up the hill on a winter’s night— one of my first impressions of Budapest.

In the years since, I have ridden the cogwheel through the seasons, spring, summer, fall, and winter, paced up and down its platforms, learnt each of its station names, saluted its conductors, walked alongside its cog tracks.

Even at home, unseen, the rumble of its passage is our grandfather’s clock, marking the passage of time. Its toy-like compartments mark the beginning and end of my trips to and from the city.

So bear me while I write a bit about this quaint hillside transport, its past and its role on New Years Day.

The snows had melted away a few days after Christmas, leaving the hills somewhat naked and forlorn. Along the cog tracks running behind the house, the ground had reverted back to the mottled brown of decomposing leaves, mute and humid underfoot. Evenings, only a few Christmas lights and the windows of the passing cogwheel would periodically illuminate the darkness— a series of rounded square windows framing muffled faces that ascended and descended with regularity behind a screen of stark trees.

But on the first morning of the New Year, I came to the window to find a fine filigree of frost lacing every twig, every branch, every leaf, every gate, every roof tile, every stone. And the air, it seemed a diaphanous white veil, through which one moved like a trembling young bride. From this hazy picture, the red and cream cogwheel emerged like a carriage from a fairytale. Its sliding doors opened with a whoosh just before our feet on the icy platform, and in we stepped.

It is a family tradition to take the cogwheel train up to the top of Széchenyi Hill for a little stroll in the forest on the first day of the year.

I imagine that at no other time, at no other moment, does the cogwheel ride resemble more its first journeys of the late 19th century than on a white winter’s day— snow and frost render almost invisible the houses that have multiplied in the past four decades on the hillsides, the canvas is once again blank. One is transported to those times when vineyards still covered the slopes, with only a scattering of villas, visited during the weekends by those living in the seething cauldron of Pest.

When Niklaus Riggenbach, a Swiss locomotive designer, built continental Europe’s second cog railway here in 1874, he replaced an hours-long horse-and-buggy service that had effectively limited expansion on the Buda hills with an open-window steam-powered train decked in green livery.

Even in the few decades following 1929, when the steam engines were replaced with electric trains and yellow passenger cars, there was nothing but a lone school among fruit orchards and grassy slopes near our station.

The present cogwheel trains are rarely ever filled to capacity. One begins to recognize faces, of passengers and conductors, one runs into neighbors. Once, on our way back home after midnight, well past the hour of the last train going up hill, we spied a darkened cogwheel heading towards a station we happened to be passing. Rushing to the platform, we waved to the conductor, who halted the train, and begged him to take us up. He opened the doors with a whoosh, and we took up seats in the dark. Up went the phantom train, with lights switching on midway, not stopping until it had reached our station, whereupon we thanked the conductor, bid him a good night and happy holidays, letting the cogwheel continue on its way.

villes d'eaux

«Hévíz», work in progress, 2012

Scenes from Budapest, Evening dances underground

«Danseurs en rond», aquarelle

As November draws to a close, wooden huts of motley wares mushroom across the squares of the city, giving shape to Christmas markets that will soon illuminate the darkness of Central European winters.

The wailing arabesques of fiddles cut through the late autumn air, surprise you at corners, mingle with the sweet aroma of roasted chestnuts. Night falls shortly after 4 o’clock, and all anyone would like to do after work is squirrel himself away in some cozy niche with warm company and mulled wine.

One such frosty evening, V took me down to the Gödör Klub on Erzsébet tér (management has since changed hands, and it is now called Akvárium), an underground pit in the middle of the city that hosts various nocturnal and cosmopolitan parties of music and dance. But that evening, Gödör had donned on the aura of one of Gogol’s country tales, becoming the “light burning somewhere at the end of the village as soon as evening comes on,” where “laughter and singing is heard in the distance, there is the twang of the balalaika and, at times, of the fiddle, talk and noise […] lads burst into the cottage with the fiddler, there is an uproar at once, fun begins, they set off dancing, and I could not tell you all the pranks that are played.”¹

In the dimness of candlelight and Christmas garlands, a music ensemble composed of contrabass, violins, the hurdy-gurdy, the zither, and the cimbalom, performed for a dance floor filled with men and women of all ages holding one other by the waist and shoulders, twirling madly about, now clockwise, now counter-clockwise. On the men were sleek polished leather boots that glinted softly and reached just below their knees and slim trousers topped with a billowing white shirt. On the women were flowing skirts that flared as they spun around, their heads tilted back, their eyes fixed on their partners.

The entire scene did not give one the impression of being too folkloric, but rather of something pulsing and vibrant, of a past woven seamlessly into the present.

When the couples’ dance had ended, the women parted to the edge of the floor and the men formed a circle to perform for the women a dance, the legényes from the Kalotaszeg region of Transylvania. The musicians took to their instruments and one by one, each of the men puffed into the circle, executing a series of improvised leg flourishes with his black leather boots, now tapping the ground with his heel and boot tip, now kicking the air and bending his knees to the melody of the fiddle. Like a marionette, he seemed to leap into the air in starts and spurts, his torso straight, his head level, with his limbs in autonomous animation. All the while, the women looked on sternly, amusingly, their hands on their hips, swaying also to the music, admiring, evaluating, reveling. How like life!

We took part in the next couple’s dance, but this part of the night with men in a circle, dancing, vying for the feminine gaze, was most memorable. I shall be sorry when I leave this city of underground dances whose folk roots flourish on modern dance floors.

¹ Nikolai Gogol, (Evenings in a Village near Dikanka, preface to Volume I, 1831)

A performance clip of a Kalotaszegi legényes

Spaces, places

Is it possible to imagine that this batik had its origins in a sleigh racing over snow through a frost-laced forest, tinkling bells to the music of Tchaikovsky? Bearing a happy couple bundled in furs, each peering from under their snug chapkas at the wondrous wintry kingdom fleeting by? Somewhere along the way, an elephant from Mughal India crept underneath my hand, and the snows melted away to reveal flowers of a tropical jungle.

But perhaps I have confused the beginnings of this balmy promenade with another dream, now that autumn is here once more, and winter is not far away.

The room is veiled in silence, folds of saris the colors of pandan leaves and conch shell lips. Tendrils of interwoven golden threads climb a trellis of emerald silk, glimmering dimly in crystal drops scattered about like morning dew. A young Tahitian woman’s gaze captured by Gauguin’s brush is reflected in the mirror. Her fragrance has wafted across oceans. Noa noa, a lovely word.

The door opens out into the morning air. A heavy fog the color of bones has enveloped the entire city. From the balcony, one can barely make out the jeweled dome of the Parliament on the other side of the river. A few minutes pass and Parliament disappears. And then go the two spirals of St Anne. And the cylinder that is Hotel Budapest. And the brick chimney of a hospital. The city is a paper screen, darkened now and again by the stroke of a wet brush, before reassuming its unblemished opacity. The city is a paper screen for my shadow theatre.

I’m floating in the Jugendstilbad, eyes lifted toward the vaulted ceiling and painted walls. As steadily as the fountain trickles, they expand and fall away, revealing the misty hills of Lake Garda. Waves lap gently against the wooden pier, where two young girls await the return of a pleasure boat. The boat is rocking like a cradle in the middle of Lake Balaton. A child bravely jumps into the water, buoyed by a bright orange life vest. Orange, the color of hope, like the coat of the royal Bengal tiger hiding under the boat’s tarpaulin, stranded at sea with a boy from Pondicherry. A bigger cousin of the feline now stretched up against the heater, its ginger coat rising and falling ever so softly.

Spaces, places confound, conspire, in the unfathomable depths of an autumn canvas.

Scenes from Budapest, Bomo Art

«Hőlégballonok Budapest felett» Hot-air balloons over Budapest (via Bomo Art)

C'était l'époque où les crinolines, les cages d'acier avaient pris leurs proportions les plus extravagantes, et il me semble qu'elle émergeait d'une véritable montgolfière de soie blanche.

It was the age when crinolines, those cages of steel, had taken on the most extravagant proportions, and it seemed to me that she was emerging from a hot-air balloon of white silk.

— Pierre Loti, Prime jeunesse (1919, p 34)

Touching that Pierre Loti, indefatigable voyager and Orientalist, lover of Istanbul, would in his old age depict the outmoded women’s skirts of his youth as hot-air balloons, so that even in a drawing-room, one was still elsewhere, circumnavigating the world and time in 80 days.

Something in that picture reverberates in the little shop on Régiposta utca 14 (14 Old Post Office Street), home of Bomo Art stationery, in its leather-bound journals and exquisitely printed original paper sheets. Surannée, like the pomaded locks of Valentino, or the waltz in a tango; dépassé, like an English rose at the piano, or a gentleman’s monocle; surannée, like the perfume of parchment maps, the gentle folds of a silken bow; dépassé, like skating on a frozen lake in the snow.

Praxinoscope (via Bomo Art)

Spinning the praxinoscope in the shop round, a child hovers over its rotating mirrors to glimpse a neatly trimmed corseted lady walk up and down a flight of stairs. Kaleidoscopes wrapped in embossed prints of painted birds and animals, compasses and astrolabes, lilacs and lavender, line the shelves above her, by drawers full of watercolor postcards with calligraphic greetings.

But by far the most charming print adorning journals, boxes and gift card sets is of a painting of hot-air balloons hovering over Budapest, like women’s crinoline skirts spread full in a magnificent ballroom.

And the presider of the ball, a benevolent Baba Yaga with a bird’s nest of hair, will have her house on chicken legs carry you more swiftly than a wink to those long bygone days.

the skies over Aachen

Gisèle Celan-Lestrange. - «Entreciel», 1979

Parlez-moi de la pluie et non pas du beau temps
Le beau temps me dégoûte et m’fait grincer les dents
Le bel azur me met en rage car le plus grand amour
Qui m’fut donné sur terre, je l’dois au mauvais temps
Je l’dois à Jupiter, il me tomba d’un ciel d’orage

Speak to me of the clouds, speak to me of the rain
Fair days drive me in rage, they go against my grain
The azure skies will only make me blue
For the greatest love to ever fall in my view
I owe to Jupiter and to his thunder coup
On the wings of a hurricane it blew.

— Georges Brassens, L'Orage (The Storm)


My love tells me that before the clouds of the Atlantic move inland over the continent, they first relieve themselves over Aachen and the Low Countries. That is why, evening and morn’, the cobblestones of the city glisten romantically and mirror the festive comings and goings of Christmastide.

At 10 o’clock in the morning, while we were seated at breakfast in one of the ornamental rooms of Café Van den Daele, a gust of wind brought a tinkering of rain against the windowpanes. Beyond the prism of hand-blown 17th-century glass, the pine wreaths and their twinkling lights swayed to and fro over the street below. They brightened and dimmed to the fluctuating hues of the lathered sky above. How rapidly the nimbus traversed the atmosphere, and the stratus and the cumulus, now cloaking, now revealing the city.

Dampness is perpetual in Aix-la-Chapelle, with water pouring from the sky and water welling from the earth; the Romans called the place Aquis-Granum or Aquis Villa. Granted, it was in reference to the thermal springs that made a spa town out of a marsh. Of all places, Charlemagne set his sights on Aix to be the heart of his Empire. “For the waters,” it was written. As the Romans had discovered, natural hot springs can be comforting when you are wintering in the company of 12,000 soldiers. And what about Aix-en-Provence rather?

One of the founding fathers of Europe, Charlemagne is called, making Aachen a European city par excellence. By his imperial will, the towering Carolus Magnus, son of Pepin the Short, built and shaped a city’s and a continent’s destiny. Under Constantine’s motto, “One Empire, one God, one Emperor,” he tore down the Irminsul of the pagan Saxons and erected instead an octagonal dome dedicated to the Virgin Mary, his own pillar to heaven beyond the clouds. And water fell in ever greater quantities, and the city prospered and became one of the most beautiful of cities north of the Alps, drawing luminaries and crowning kings and emperors for 600 years. And whereas the clouds take cue whenever they pass over the cathedral of Aachen, the Allied pilots took care to spare it during their bombardment of Germany in WWII.

Gazing out at the warped sky, we measure the fleeting thoughts of Europe and Empire and the Euro crisis….

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L'Idée d'Europe

A voyage to the north this weekend, to the city of one of the founding fathers of Europe...

Albrecht Dürer's dream vision

"In the year 1525, between Wednesday and Thursday after Whitsunday during the night, I saw this appearance in my sleep, how many great waters fell from heaven. The first struck the earth about four miles away from me with a terrific force, with tremendous clamor and clash, drowning the whole land. I was so sore afraid that I awoke from it before the other waters fell. And the waters which had fallen were very abundant. Some of them fell further away, some nearer, and they came down from a great height that they all seemed to fall with equal slowness. But when the first water, which hit the earth, was almost approaching, it fell with such swiftness, wind and roaring, that I was so frightened when I awoke that my whole body trembled and for a long while I could not come to myself. So when I arose in the morning, I painted above as I had seen it. God turn all things to the best."

Albrecht Dürer

Translated in A. Rosenthal, "Dürer’s dream of 1525," Burlington Magazine 69, August 1936.