Mr. and Mrs. Confidential are set to travel to a family reunion in Hilton Head, South Carolina, with side excursions to Chrlaeston and Savannah, and pleasant thoughts of being on the road again have led to the inevitable ruminations on previous trips.
I've returned to Eger, Hungary three times since the visit recounted below, and although the crowds are larger and more multinational, and the standard of living thankfully raised, the city's charm remains intact.
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Wine has been produced in Hungary for thousands of years, and it remains important economically and socially ... but foreigners used to drinking wine are generally disappointed by the Hungarian variety. Under Communism, most of what wasn't consumed at home went to the Soviet Union where, frankly, they were happy to drink anything. This and state control offered little incentive to upgrade antiquated standards of wine-making ... (but) all that is changing, and fast.Excerpts from Hungary: A Travel Survival Kit (Lonely Planet Publications), by Steve Fallon.
As a foreigner who is not accustomed to drinking wine to any great extent, I haven't shared Fallon’s disappointment in Hungarian wine. Then again, I've tended to stick to the variety I know best, which is the reason that Frank Thackeray and I traveled to Eger, Hungary in August 1995 for a day of scientific vino sampling.
It was a pleasant change of pace in terms of human geography, as well as being a refreshing departure from the rigors of comprehensive beer sampling that take up the bulk of my travel time these days.
Eger is a city of 66,000 people in north-central Hungary. Slovakia, where we were visiting prior to our jaunt across the border, is nearby to the north, and Hungary's capital city of Budapest is two and a half hours away by train.
One look at Eger from the vantage point of the city's castle and the visitor is reminded of Hungary's reputation for agricultural prowess. If left to their own devices, as Hungary’s people generally were from the late 1960’s until 1989 -- even under Communism -- Hungarians produce abundant vegetables and edibles. The city is surrounded by low, rolling hills, some of them wooded, but mostly covered by broad expanses of cultivated fields.
This initial impression of a small city nestled in a productive farming region points to two relevant observations.
First, that Eger is a relatively isolated, provincial outpost, albeit one with a rich history.
Second, that it boasts one crucial attribute that many other similarly situated cities don't have, which is strong, flavorful wine in great abundance -- an adequate reason for existence by virtually any standard.
Indeed, Eger is a wine making center of long standing, and it enjoys an international reputation as the home of Egri Bikaver "Bull's Blood," a rich red wine.
The city is an efficient tourist center catering to those who are in search of an affordable, wine-soaked vacation spot -- foreigners in greater numbers than ever, but still mostly Hungarians, who come both for the wine and to enjoy the city as a base for trips into the wooded hills to the southwest and northeast.
I see Eger as an overgrown, Magyarized version of Joe Huber's, except that the wine and paprika-laced food are actually good, and no one up in Starlight speaks Hungarian (the English spoken up there in the Knobs is another, equally indecipherable story).
Besides, you can't get to Huber's by train. Depending on where you begin, the same is almost true of Eger, as Frank and I discovered when we traveled by rail from Kosice, Slovakia.
We crossed the Slovak-Hungarian border at Hidesnameti, rolled straight through the industrial city of Miskolc, debarked at Fuszabony and changed to another line for the 25-minute ride to Eger.
Other than the unpronounceable names, it all sounds smooth on the surface.
It wasn't.
Our first problem was money. None of the banks in Kosice would sell us Hungarian forints, and we didn't want to pay the customarily inflated price for buying an international ticket through to our destination, so we decided to take our chances with paying point-to-point on the train, then changing money into Hungarian forints at our first opportunity.
This strategy usually works in eastern Europe, although it should never be tried on trains in places like Germany or Scandinavia, where you'll likely be lectured harshly in impeccable English, heavily fined or even heaved onto a nowhere village platform for your trouble.
They're usually looser to the east, and accordingly, Slovak crowns covered the brief trip to the border. From Hidesnemeti, where the stop was too short to change money, the fare to Fuszabony was easily negotiated in German marks (and a dollar bill) with an accommodating conductor who quickly calculated exchange rates and recorded the transaction on a receipt for future reference.
We planned on changing money at Fusezabony, only to find that the two banks in a dusty Hungarian prairie town that lacked only sagebrush, tumbleweeds and six-shooters to be in western Kansas both were choosing to ignore their posted hours of business.
Without forints, we were doomed to a parched 2 and 1/2 hour wait in a spartan, almost deserted station bereft of fans or circulating air, keeping company with a few dozen very bored flies and an elderly female toilet attendant who insisted on eyeing us remorselessly after overhearing me attempt to interest an utterly indifferent station buffet worker in changing money on the sly.
Needless to say, no money -- no refreshment.
When our crushingly useless vigil ended, and the train for Eger began boarding, we readied our foreign currency for the inevitable haggling over the means by which we, as forint-less outsiders, would pay the fare.
To our astonishment, the young female conductor was paralyzed at the sight of the dollar bills we offered. Her superior, an older man, took one of the bills and studied it as though it read "Republic of Outer Jupiter," and after a consultation, neither conductor would accept any money for the trip. In very slight English, we were instructed to get Hungarian money at Eger -- almost as if they were more worried that we didn't somehow understand that Hungarian money is required in Hungary than in collecting what was owed them.
The episode was doubly strange in that it has only been a few years since every resident of the area behind the Iron Curtain spent most waking moments seeking hard currency and knew not only what all foreign money looked like, but probably serial numbers and signatures of American treasury secretaries as well.
In those days, if you were willing, local money was always a few feet away in the form of human automatic teller machines. Now it would seem that capitalism has deprived our two otherwise cordial conductors of the entrepreneurial ability to wheel and deal. It isn't supposed to work that way.
At the same time, it might have been the fact that the fare amounted to a total of four bucks, and it was just too little to be important to unimaginative state employees on a very hot day.
Thus, we arrived in Eger and proceeded to walk down a broad, pleasant avenue lined with large houses, vines and trees that that had an odd, out of place, southern feel, to the central tourist office.
A laconic, bearded employee phoned a pension (family-run guest house) and arranged a room, and, finally, we changed money legally and easily -- a lesson yet to be learned back at the somnolent Fuzsabony.
Eger's old town is compact and largely unmarred by the Communist era's concrete pile 'o' feces architecture. Recent years have brought waves of restoration and renovation, and the city would seem to have emerged from it all in fairly good condition. There are hotels, rooms to let and some new pensions (small, usually family-owned guest houses).
Restaurants are plentiful and Hungarian food is available in all its typically rich abundance. More importantly, there is the best reason for visiting, the wine.
White wines are made in Eger, including very sweet versions of the famous Tokaj wine that both the Hungarians and the Slovaks claim to have originated, but it is the city's "Bull's Blood" that is most renowned.
Predictably, there are several stories that purport to explain the name. Both go back to the period, roughly 400 years ago, when rampaging Turks were a constant threat to east-central Europe.
During one fierce battle for the town of Eger, which ended in victory for the Hungarian defenders, it is said that the attacking Turks became frightened by the red stains on the beards of their enemies, because they believed that the Hungarians were drinking the blood of bulls for strength.
Actually, the Hungarian commander had been fortifying his bastions not only with stones and lumber, but with copious amounts of Eger's blood-red wine, too.
Several years after this battle, the marauding Turks returned and captured the city, and a second story holds that following the Turk victory, the pasha who arrived to rule the area decreed that each evening a selected father must bring one of his virginal daughters for an evening's worth of carnal pleasures.
One father duly arrived with his daughter at the appointed time, and he brought with him a bottle of liquid that he was able to convince the pasha was bull's blood, which the Turk was led to believe would increase his potency.
However, the bottle really held red wine, which the Muslim functionary was unaccustomed to drinking owing to Islamic restrictions. The pasha passed out before he could do the deed, and the daughter's honor was spared.
Since that time, it is likely that Eger's wine has helped to promote more sexual liaisons than it has thwarted, but that is only speculation.
Regardless of the truth of these stories, modern-day residents of Eger are reminded of their erstwhile Turkish rulers by a lone minaret on the site of a mosque that disappeared long ago. The tower reposes in slender phallic splendor just meters away from Minaret Hotel, whose adjacent restaurant was the venue for our afternoon meal on Saturday.
The highlight of the feast was an oversized bowl of carp soup. Carp is raised in farm ponds in east/central Europe and is reminiscent of catfish. The carp in my soup was cut into big, fatty filets that exuded just the right amount of pungent fishiness, and only barely crossing the thin line between flavor and offensiveness. I washed it down with mineral water in an effort to preserve my palate for the wine tasting to come.
Following our ample afternoon meal, we embarked on the 25-minute walk to Eger's major attraction, at least to us: The Valley of the Beautiful Women, where there was reputed to be a number of privately-owned wine cellars dispensing the magic red liquid of legend.
Would there really be beautiful women? It would be hard to imagine any better than the attractive Slovaks who had paraded past our vantage point of the previous afternoon, a sidewalk cafe of sorts on the main street in Kosice. I knew the women in Budapest were fine -- none better in the Communist bloc back in '87 -- yet this was the backcountry, not Budapest ... but I digress.
Our pleasant stroll past numerous signboards and notices, and conversations overheard as natives walked past, reconfirmed the impenetrability of the Hungarian language. Those familiar with Romance languages, or who has picked up a few words from Slavic tongues, or has noticed that there are similarities between German and English will find that absolutely none of any of this bears the slightest relevance to Hungarian. Double consonants and diacritical marks proliferate like rabbits in long Hungarian sentences, all vying for space and straining the untutored eye.
In Eger, wine is the answer to any linguistic problem. Continuing our walk after a brief pause to survey a cemetery that was composed of rows of boxes stacked like building blocks that contain cremated remains, with the effect being not unlike the cheap socialist-era housing blocks that surround most Hungarian cities, we arrived at the crest of a hill.
Looking into the valley below us, we saw tour buses and mobs of people. Set into the hillsides were the concrete, stone and wood fronts of the wine cellars, many with iron doors and some with seating areas outside, where the small vineyard owners mature their wines and dispense them to revelers from far and wide on a sporadic, eclectic basis.
Eger's wines rarely are varietals. Instead, two or three types of grapes are blended together. According to what we were told, Eger's grapes demand extremes in temperatures -- warm summers and cold winters.
The late afternoon heat shimmered on the row of tour buses as we descended the slope and into the valley. The atmosphere was similar to that of a county fair, with numerous food and drink stands, music and dancing, and a few carnival rides greeting us.
After taking a circuit of the narrow valley by way of a looping road with a park in the middle and surveying the various options, we entered a cellar and sat at a long table. The natives inside ignored us completely and carried on drinking their ruby-red concoctions, so we beat a hasty retreat and tried again, this time ducking into an entrance behind which were stairs descending into the earth.
We were greeted by a wonderful South African proprietor who learned Hungarian from her husband and had moved to Eger five years before to manage the cellar where we sat. It was cool, damp and moldy. Previous visitors had pressed forint coins into the growths for good luck.
First we were served a young red wine that had yet to attain fullness or balance. This and subsequent samples were served by our hostess from a long, bulbous tube into which she drew the wine from the containers by cupping her lips around the tube and inhaling, and then poured it by using her little finger to direct the gravity-fed spray into our glasses.
The second sample was her vineyard's version of "Bull's Blood." A large, commercial winery makes the Egri Bikaver that is sold overseas; what we tasted at the first and subsequent cellars were local interpretations.
Appropriately, the afternoon turned into evening, and we moved on to other cellars, and one thing dissolved into another. We stuck to the reds. Egri Bikaver in its many local incarnations is bold, acidic and tannic. In retrospect, it was a good idea to fill our stomachs with food before undertaking the consumption of the wine, vast quantities of which on an empty stomach might not have been a wise idea.
Eger's trademark red passes the sole test that I apply to my infrequent tastings of wine, which is to ask, "would Ernest Hemingway have liked this?"
Hemingway did not waste words describing effeminate whites with delicacy and reserve; instead, he wrote about red wines that make the earth move (at least I think it was wine in that scene from For Whom the Bell Tolls.)
I don't know if Hemingway ever visited Eger, but I imagine he would have approved of Bull's Blood.
After several hours of sampling, we made our way back into the center of the city and capped off the evening with more wine and a beer. Next morning our wheeler-dealer host Miklos determined train times and called a cab for us, and we were off for the return trip to Kosice to meet my friend Joe for a last round of beers prior to the overnight train to Prague.
This time, with ample Hungarian money in hand and fairly begging to use it, we were charged for only one leg of the Eger-Fuzsabony-Hidesnameti return trip.
At Miskolc there was a three-hour wait. I remembered from several through trips in 1991 that the Miskolc train station restaurant was good and relatively cheap, and so we killed our time there over rough-and -ready goulash soup and a few bottled beers.
Mainstream Hungarian beers use adjuncts and tend to be mild and spritzy with the exception of "bak" beers, which are loosely based on German bocks and provide more to chew on than the everyday Hungarian lagers, although to sweet extent that makes one yearn for hop balance.
From Miskolc, it was back north across the border to Kosice and our prearranged rendezvous with my friend and ex-English student Joe Ivanco.
We chose the open-air courtyard of a temporarily fashionable pub for our final evening in Kosice and drank delectable draft Budvar, which might be the world’s most superbly balanced golden lager beer.
For the story of the first time Joe and I drank beer together in 1991, go here.
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