Coming in from the cold
Christian House
If there were a premier league for flea markets, the Ecseri site on the hem of Budapest would rank as the coolest. By that I mean that at 7 a.m. on a Saturday morning in the cut of winter it is blanketed in a numbing sub-zero frost. We stand kicking the circulation back into our feet. I’m visiting with Patrick (an atypically droll Australian) and his girlfriend Emma (a typically poised Parisian) as guests of our friend Kata Gereben, one of Hungary’s leading art investment advisers. She has offered us a whistle-stop tour of the more unusual elements of the city’s art world.
Named after the original site in the city centre, Ecseri is one of Europe’s oldest antique and bric-à-brac markets. It’s a sprawling beast: a huge rabbit warren of indoor alleyways and outdoor quads. The quality of merchandise is wildly diverse, ranging from rubbish to rarities. Paintings, snake skins, lace and shotguns can all be found within an arm’s reach of each other, alongside a hefty amount of Soviet and Wehrmacht memorabilia. It’s soon apparent that Kata is more than a match for even the burliest traders. Pipe-slim, astute, and with armour-piercing eyes, she scythes down their sales patter while we gawp and shiver.
She introduces us to György, an affable exstage director who trawls the market every week for potential additions to his cabinets of ceramic and silver. He’s a strangely nebulous character, simultaneously distant and engaging, a little like Bruce Chatwin’s Utz. After informing us that we’ve arrived too late for the best finds (5 a.m. is the optimum time), he explains how this teeming bazaar has been forged by conflict. Over the years the shifting sands of royal, political and military power saw the Habsburgs, Nazis and Stasi all leaving town in a hurry. And they left their booty up for grabs. ‘All the palaces and castles were looted during the 20th century,’ says György, ‘and these gypsies are the inheritors of those thieves. Most of them can’t even read but they have a good eye. They know what they have. But,’ he smiles with suitable flamboyance, ‘it’s the dealers who are the most ruthless.’ He takes us on a tour of the fringe elements, from the car-boot sale beyond the perimeter walls to the manuscript stores hidden indoors. Here, stacks of mildewy papers offer the promise of finding a Prussian epic or an autographed Bartók score. We rummage and poke among the linen, erotica, rugs and firearms until the cold takes its toll. Patrick points out that ‘her Emma-nence’ is suffering in her icy boots.
Ignoring the heavy-set girls with their trays of extra-thick socks, we stumble to the market café for lkngos — a savoury doughnut straight from the vat, salted, sprinkled with cheese and brushed with garlic butter — helped down with lemon tea. Pongy but warm, we call it a day and retreat to the car. To further emphasise our Western failings a DDR-era Trabant chugs along ahead, hampering our return to the boulevards of Pest. ‘Basically they’re made of paper,’ sighs Kata as she shifts down a gear.
The following morning we zip up the funicular (lovely wooden carriages, ridiculously short ride) to Castle Hill on the Buda-side bank of the Danube. The National Gallery sits proudly at the top, announcing a major Modernist show, while opposite the Prime Minister’s residence stands sedately among mediaeval buildings, many pockmarked by the shelling during the 1956 uprising.
However, it’s a new plot along the perimeter of the hill that Kata wants to show us. The villa originally owned by the Jewish Baron Ferenc Hatvany, one of Hungary’s most famous art collectors, is being rebuilt to its original spec. It’s a building with a sorry tale at its foundations — its predecessor was obliterated towards the end of the second world war. Both German troops and Russian authorities pillaged Hatvany’s art collection, including works by Cézanne, Ingres and Renoir, from bank vaults. For the most part the extraordinary group of paintings remains unrestituted to his heirs (one exception, Courbet’s ‘Femme Nue Couchée’, is currently on loan to the Grand Palais in Paris). Hungarians, Kata asserts, have a stunted attitude to restitution. Many of Hatvany’s paintings now hang on the walls of Budapest’s state galleries and in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow. Taking them out of public view and returning them to private ownership flies in the face of the communist teaching that still persists in all but the youngest generation.
In the pre-war years, Hatvany, a sugar baron, would stroll over to enjoy the Biedermeier atmosphere of the Ruszwurm Confectionary which nestles into a terrace a few streets from his villa. Its sweet trade continues to this day and the four of us happily consume coffees, hazelnut mousse and apple pastries under its vaulted ceilings. Emerging into the glacial air, we face another mainstay of the city — one of the myriad statues to Magyar dignitaries. Jobbing sculptors must have enjoyed a secure career choice in 19th-century Budapest. The bronze statue of Count András Hadik on horseback has a unique feature — his steed’s testicles are as shiny as a newly minted forint. Legend has it that a touch of buffing brings luck to exam-stressed students — probably not the legacy Hadik envisaged when he led his Austro-Hungarian Hussars successfully into Berlin during the Seven Years’ War. For our final evening, Kata takes us to the square housing the Ferenc Liszt Academy of Music for hearty fare at Menza. This slick restaurant with a young, friendly crowd has contemporary art on the walls and a taupe and chocolate colour scheme. It looks like The Lives of Others set-designed by Damien Hirst. We are here to enjoy one masterpiece that remains firmly in the city’s sights: velos csont. This potent dish of marrow, roasted in the bone and tapped out in a rich dollop, was immortalised by the Hungarian fin-desiècle author, Gyula Krúdy. A bon viveur, ladies’ man and duellist, Krúdy certainly sucked the marrow out of life. He wrote over 50 novels, enjoyed the uptown girls and extolled the pleasures of his national cuisine at a time when Budapest was the financial capital of Mitteleurope. A century of war and occupation later and here we are, four nationalities enjoying it as the city shines once more in the glow of rosier times. It seems, just for a moment, as if Budapest might be coming in from the cold.
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