Count Miklós Bánffy

Many of you know that I admire the work of Miklos Banffy, the author and statesman who lived in Cluj, ran the opera house in Budapest, was foreign minister of Hungary and organised the last coronation of a king of Hungary. I have enjoyed the following article published on the blog of Lucy Abel-Smith who organised the first Transylvanian Book Festival and is planning a second for 2016. Enjoy this account of a recent tour through Hungary and Romania led by Lucy. Paddy very much followed in Banffy’s footsteps and wrote the foreword to the first English translation of Banffy’s wonderful Transylvanian Trilogy.

“In a brown velvet jacket and wide trousers he walked a little self conscious from one desk to the other… ‘I am drawing here, am writing there, at the third one I read’… I have forgotten what he did at the fourth… ’Somehow it seems more comfortable this way – he apologised and also I am very disorderly…”

In this charming description of his working habits, Miklos Banffy is disarmingly modest. This self deprecation is made all the more poignant by our visits to a few of his haunts – revealing something of this gifted, multilingual and many facetted man. Our journey was half in Budapest and then in Cluj and, at a slower pace in a few Hungarian Transylvanian villages in the traditional Saxon area. We behaved as if we were taking part in the Budapest Season before the war in a hectic race from place to place. From Cluj to Sibiu the pace was more measured.

Nearly seven decades after his death in Budapest in 1950, Miklos Banffy, one of the greatest novelists of the 20th century is only now being recognised by the English-speaking world. Jaap Scholten, in his Comrade Baron, describes what happened to so many of Banffy’s generation of Hungarian Transylvanians under Communism. Banffy’s own fate was no better. He died penniless, unsung and unread except by Hungarians. Jaap spoke to us over dinner on our first evening in the comfort of the Art’otel beneath the castle of Buda, on the bank of the Danube.

Day two began with a tour through the capital, bringing home the majesty of the Danube and the spirit of the 19th century movers and shakers in Buda and in Pest. At this time, Transylvania was still linked to the Kingdom of Hungary but ruled from Vienna. A visit to the truly National Museum, conceived by Ferenc Szechenyi, houses wonderful Renaissance furnishings from Slovakia and Transylvania including the great tomb monument of Michael Apafy (d. 1635), from Malancrav, which was relevant as this Baroque monument was carved by an artist from Spis and was commissioned for Malancrav, in Saxon Transylvania, where our journey would end.

Read more here.