Sopron, Hungary

One recent Monday I had the privilege of visiting the Hungarian border city Sopron. Two other friends and I took the hour-long train ride from Vienna to that city on the edge of the Neusiedlersee--the large, shallow border lake--and met up with another long-ago friend from work, Jules, who had grown up in Sopron and fled Hungary with his family in the anti-Communist revolt of 1956. Jules walked us through the city, beginning with the church he had attended as a child. Just old enough to remember the events of late 1944 and 1945, Jules showed us where he had been playing outside his apartment building when he first heard an air raid siren. A German soldier, he said, grabbed him up and rushed him into a bomb shelter. He also showed us a place on a nearby sidewalk where after an air raid he had seen a dead child and the street in which he had seen dead horses. The war is still much in physical evidence in Sopron. The old city area has buildings and partial structures from the Middle Ages to the present; buildings from much earlier times stand next to modern structures--as in Vienna's inner city, the new structures are evidence of where bombs once fell. In the afternoon we drove along back roads and through a Communist-era border crossing--old watch towers, stone markers, and barricade bars still stand. Austria took in thousands of Hungarian refugees in 1956, including Jules and his family, who eventually made their way to the U.S.

Gaby, our kind and generous German teacher at the Embassy, who grew up in post-war Vienna, remarked that she and many other Austrians have a distaste for traveling in the former Soviet Bloc countries and have a hard time understanding Americans who do like to visit them. During the Cold War years, in particular, she said, she met many Americans who wanted to travel to Austria's borders to see the physical manifestations of the Iron Curtain. She recounted a car trip to Prague in the 1980s with her mother, grandmother, and two children, and how the border crossings were ordeals. They were detained for 2 hours while they were questioned and the car was searched and partially dismantled; border guards went through their luggage, purses, and pockets, even counting their money. Such experiences, she said, are why many Austrians still dislike the thought of traveling to Eastern Europe.

Filler

-- Our afternoon drive across the Hungarian border back into Austria took us to Rust, a village famous for its population of storks, which build their nests on metal rings set up on house roofs. During our visit, we saw storks feeding their chicks. Regurgitated potatoes, I am guessing. (See the last two pictures in the Sopron photos below.)

-- On the Monday holiday (Whitsuntide), Linda and I walked along the Danube from the center of Vienna a few miles east toward Bratislava--heading out along the south side of the river and returning on the north side. The day was bright and warm, and when we got back to the city center we plopped down on a bench at a busy pedestrian square, Schwedenplatz, to rest up, cool off, rehydrate with Ottakringer, and people-watch. Throngs of people with somewhere to go were striding and milling through the square, bringing their own kind of coldness. An Embassy friend of ours got "bumped into" here the week before and had his wallet lifted. Pigeons moseyed across the concrete checking seams and cracks for crumbs, alert to the peril of being stepped on. On a bench across from us, resting in the shade, sat a very old woman, assisted by a man who was probably her son. They looked as if they had come in from the country on a holiday outing. She wore trachten: a long green skirt and green vest over a white blouse, and sturdy black shoes; from behind thick lenses her huge blue eyes smiled into the distance, all the way back to childhood, I thought, as she licked a vanilla ice cream cone--sweet and cold.

-- Recently, accompanied by our guests from Texas, Greg and Marilyn, we drove southwest of Vienna to Mirazell, a small ski-resort town in the Alps and the site of a "pilgrimage church," where a statue of Mary is certified to have produced a miracle. The church, whose interior is exceptionally ornate, is far larger than the little parish itself would seem to warrant. Stretching from the church square and out along the streets are kiosks selling religious gewgaws--wall plaques, candles, beads, figurines, and "miracle" elixirs. We saw an EMT squad tending to a man who had fallen on some stone steps and whose face was bleeding--all the religious remedies were ignored. Hotels and restaurants for skiers and pilgrims abound. The real miracle, however, is the area around the town. Much of the mountain scenery that we have come across in Austria is, I think, at least as striking as the Amalfi coast or Cinque Terre in Italy, but it seems to have been discovered only by the Austrians.