Index – Culture – Watch the film reels, listen to Kossuth!



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The story is on a special timeline. Looking at the present, we think that all we have left behind is the past. While the memories that emanate from him determine the minutes and hours of our day. And the last years and centuries have been sitting around our necks here.

For example, let’s watch the following video.

It is almost incredible that the recording shows Artúr Görgei himself (Arthur Görgey in another document), the legendary general of the Revolution and the War of Independence of 1848-1849. In history books, they are only illustrated with paintings, depicted in an idealized artistic setting during battle, arguing with Lajos Kossuth, or simply spreading on the pages like a southern company. In reality, however, in the silent film shot in 1908, we can already observe his movement as a workaholic. Behold, the past is not very far down the timeline of history. Nothing in this recording reveals that Artúr Görgei, who otherwise had a degree in chemistry, lived in exile for a long time after the war of independence, under the supervision of the Austrian police, he was only able to return home after the Compromise ( 1867), and lived his old age on a state pension.

Artúr Görgei witnessed the outbreak of World War I, and at the age of 98, right in the middle of the Great War, he died in the same year, 1916, as the Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph and the Hungarian monarch who liberated Hungary after the defeat of the War of Independence Julius Jacob von Haynaut, as well as the era of Bach destined to break the soul of the Hungarians and merge them with the empire.

When Artúr Görgei died on May 21, 1916, Pesti Hírlap reported his last hours as follows:

Or a month ago, General Agg started getting sick again. She was brought by her Visegrád Tusculan to Budapest, with her sister-in-law, István Görgei, on Mária Valéria Street 17. They feared that her huge but already very weakened body would not be able to cope with the serious illness and wanted to be able to be by her side and take care of it with afraid. In the first week of May, his condition suddenly worsened, his old problem was accompanied by a bad cold, his lungs were also attacked, but then, a few days later, he seemed to be recovering. He regained consciousness and felt better hour after hour.

But, as the contemporary newspaper wrote, this was the last burst of his life force:

The disease progressed again this week, but his surroundings still did not dare to believe that the end was near. He was treated by his former physician, Maestro Bencze. He lost consciousness all the time, no more visitors were allowed. Then on Saturday there was total agony. His night physician had already determined that the great patient was inescapable. At ten past one at ten o’clock, General Agg fell asleep peacefully forever.

The last patrol was buried

The participation of the entire country accompanied the soldier from Lajos Kossuth on his last trip. On June 8, 1928, Kis Ujsag said goodbye to the former patriot of the 48 of István Lebó with these words. According to the newspaper, the Minister of Agriculture, John Mayer, as a descendant of the serfs freed in 1848, said goodbye to Lebo when he said:

The Hungarians were never unfaithful, they always resisted the fight to the end, so the Hungarian nation lives after all the dangers of a thousand years. The age whose last character we now accompany on his last journey also teaches us that the nation, which has always risen from the darkest grave, must forge itself with the slogan of freedom, equality and brotherhood.

István Lebó

István Lebó

According to contemporary description, the columns of the National Museum were covered with black cloth, and even the ledge with “black mourning” from which Sándor Petőfi first recited the Hungarian from Talpra 80 years ago.

In the middle of the stairs (…) between three rows of candles is the simple black coffin of István Lebó. István Lebó military cap on the coffin.

Later it turned out that the names of others besides him came up, that is, the last soldier in the Kossuth regiment was probably not István Lebó, like József Fischl (1929); Ambrus Szabó (1938), but he did not consider himself a soldier of ’48; or, for example, Mihály Geszti (1935) – but the importance of Lebo’s funeral well symbolizes the attitude of the Hungarians after Trianon’s decision of freedom, the ideal of the war of independence: the nation needed and has heroes.

Listen to Kossuth Lajos!

In the XIX. Thanks to the technical achievements of the 19th century, Lajos Kossuth’s voice can be heard in sound recordings, if not in motion. The recording was made by Károly Felner and Tivadar Barna on September 20, 1890 in Turin, when they visited the exiled Kossuth. The original phonograph cylinders are kept in the Music Library of the Széchényi National Library (OSZK). His admission was necessary because many people in Hungary wanted to attend the ceremony at Arad on October 6, 1890, but Lajos Kossuth only returned home in 1894 in a coffin. On the other hand, he set out to send a voice message to the Hungarians in 1890 and record his solemn speech.

What’s interesting about the mission is that Lajos Kossuth was reluctant to embrace the new technology and, based on NSZL’s description, managed to get him to deliver his “devil machine” speech with just a few inventions. The library’s database reveals that the speech, which lasted between six and seven minutes, originally filled three phonograph cylinders.

Because the extremely brittle wax cylinders, “certified” for an average of 30 to 40 strokes, were rotated hundreds of times, severely damaged, and one in three was lost in 1919. Of the remaining two, one entered a broken state and the another in a cracked state in late 1932, early 1933 as a gift from Károly Felner, through the Pesti Hírlap staff, along with other relics from Kossuth.



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