We return to Romania every summer. We just can't get it out of our system. Like salmon swimming upstream to reach their home waters, we take the train every summer to Transylvania. In theory it is a simple train trip. But it is never easy. Often the trains are re-routed or, like this year, the border is closed because Romania has entered the Schengen zone. Schengen, you may say, "That's great! No more border checks!" Not quite: the main rail crossing at Episcopeia Bihor was deemed "not ready for Schengen" so the train had to be diverted to Valea de East Bumfuck. But we got there. Satu Mare here we come!
The Synagogue of Satu Mare. Not the Big One.
Satu Mare abuts the Hungarian border, and for most people it is known mainly as the original home base of the Satmars - one of the largest and most insular of the fundamentalist Hasidic sects ever to emerge from the extremist Hungarian Hasidic movement. But since the Holocaust the Satmars now mostly live in Brooklyn and Antwerp. Today there are less than 100 Jews left in Satu Mare, and Klezmer violinist Zoe Aqua - with her local band and her collaborator, British violinist Anna Lowenstein - was going to give a concert at the last remaining Synagogue in Satu Mare.
Zoe and Anna in the Satu Mare Synagogue
Zoe Aqua is well known in Klezmer circles as one of the young generation of violinists diving deep into tradition in an effort to inject some much needed life into Klezmer music. Most East European folk traditions have survived into the 21st century, while the folk traditions of east European Jews were abruptly cut short by the Holocaust. Jewish survivors left for Israel or the America where - like the Satmar Hasidim - they worked to rebuild the intellectual and religious atmosphere that had been destroyed. They did not put a lot of effort into maintaining folk music traditions so that their assimilated hippie grandchildren could wake up in the 1980s and say "I'm bored of playing bluegrass banjo. I want to play Jewish music!" What we know today as "Klezmer" music was revived by a hard core of Jewish musicians who had to learn pretty much from scratch from the last alter kakkers living in Brooklyn and from scratchy gramophone 78 RPM records gleaned from Coney Island antique shops and archival sources like YIVO.
Zoe with Maramures fiddler Dumitru Covaci
That first generation of Klezmer revivalists have now ourselves become The Old Guys and it is time to pass the baton to a younger generation, one that is not covered by Medicare and can still get out of folding chairs easily. One of those young virtuosi is Zoe Aqua. Originally from Denver, Zoe was already an accomplished violinist and music teacher when she began to play Klezmer, and soon moved onto neighboring styles of music such as Transylvanian fiddle. When I first heard Zoe she was technically perfect - as a violinist - but she lacked that certain "oomph" that you get from hard core Transylvanian and Romanian fiddlers. The lead fiddler in east Europe is called a "primás". In east European string bands there is a strict hierarchy - the primás is the leader, and the accompanying second fiddles, violas and basses follow the primás. There simply ain't no democratic discussion of roles in a Gypsy band. It helps that most trad bands in Transylvania are family based - you can't complain about the leader when your sister is married to him. (And 99% of the time, it is a him.)
Zoe spent two years living in Transylvania studying traditional violin styles. During that time she visited dozens of traditional musicians in villages far off the main roads, and learned the etiquette for working with Romani families in rural areas: you bring gifts for the wife, chocolate for the kids, and you make sure to pay the fiddler for his time. She also got good enough to be accepted among the discerning and very male in-crowd of Hungarian fiddlers who pay for the dance houses in Cluj.
Zoe kidnapped in Oaș
Zoe's newish CD "In Vald Arayn" brings those two traditions, Klezmer and Transylvanian - together in compositions of her own that have the unique feel of traditional music, driven by a seasoned primás accompanied by a band of experienced Hungarian tancház musicians. This year Zoe crowdsourced funding for a project to bring those pieces to their original audiences by doing concerts in some of the remaining synagogues in Northern Romania. Me and Fumie had the pleasure of joining her for the final leg of the tour, which as always meant dropping in to visit old fiddling friends in the mountains of Maramures and the Oas region. After Satu Mare it was on to a concert at the synagogue in Sighetul Marmaței, otherwise known as Sighet, once a vibrant seat of Carpathian Jewish life and the home of Elie Wiesel. More on that in the next post - as well as amazing Romanian donuts!
Solet: The Jewish bean stew that launched and empire
So the news is that the Kádár Ékezde, the tiny traditional Hungarian lunch place that has been serving honest, real Hungarian food, is set to reopen soon. The buyer is Gerendai Károly, founder of the Sziget Festival, who also runs a string of successful restaurants such as the Michelin starred Costes. But according to press reports, they are going to keep the Kádár's atmosphere and menu much the same. The only difference is that the place will not shut after lunch, and they probably will not replicate the arcane payment ritual of reciting what you ate at the door (slices of bread and self serve glasses of seltzer included) and tipping your waitress personally by slipping money in her apron.
Raspberry soda and beet salad with horseradish at Kádár
The Kádár closed in April 2020 at the beginning of the COVID lockdowns. The owners were getting old and and the Kádár was not the kind of place that was going to flourish using Doordash deliveries. Usually this spells the end of small family run lunch spots we know as "étkezde"... although the famed Roma Étkezde in Buda Roma Étkezde in Buda did fly from the ashes after covid, which may have given the new owners the inspiration to revive the Kádár. As a resident of the neighborhood, though, I am only hoping that Kádár will not become yet another victim of the mass tourism that blights the 7th district. Its a tiny space, and it was always a refuge for neighborhood regulars. Keeping it open late might take some of the pressure off, but it will never have the table space for a stag party of a dozen drunk Brits. Hopefully, the new place will not serve beer. Its a sad truth, but it is increasingly hard to find good Hungarian food in Budapest. The traditional dishes - gulyás soup, pork stew with dumplings, stuffed cabbage - have pretty well disappeared in a sea of pizza places, trendy burger joints (serving weird ground meat things that have little relation to anything this Bronx nationalist would call a "burger") A few months ago a friend of mine from Romania called asking if I could suggest something near the Opera House that served simple pork cutlets - schnitzel. It took me an hour to find a local spot. The true horror of eating in Budapest, however, is the satanic abomination known as "Street Food".
Lángos: As God intended, plain with garlic water and salt
"Street Food" is, at best, an Insta Influencer marketing term gleefully and parasitically adopted by locals eager to milk ignorant tourists for everything they can. Let's be frank here: Hungary doesn't have a street food culture. People do not eat on the street, and traditionally food was not sold on the street for this purpose., unless , of course, you wanted to eat a live unplucked goose or chicken while sitting on the kerb. People often eat outside... but sitting down. Some often have a piece of pastry after lunch at a cafe and consider it a meal. Two slices of strudel can sub for lunch. You could walk into almost any butcher shop and eat hot sausages and pork ribs from a hot table near the counter. You could buy a lángos - fried potato dough bread - at a stand at any open market. You could eat an ice cream on the street while walking, but that was about it.
Garay tér market
But if the herds of mass tourism want street food, then street food they shall have. Walk around the 7th district and half the store fronts shout "Street Food!" at the punters. there are kolbász in a pita bread cone. There are endless interpretations of "burger" for the hungry twentysomethings. And for a taste of hungary... lángos. And burgers! Lángos burgers! A chunk of ground mystery meat sandwiched between two thick, fat, greasy potato pancakes. Hey - your cardiologist has to pay for that Tahitian vacation somehow, right?
Satan's favorite burger
A normal lángos is a simple piece of fried dough, known to any resident of an American Indian reservation as "frybread." It is usually eaten with a sprinkle of salt, and a good lángos stand has a jar of garlic chopped in water to brush onto the hot dough. Or you could have it slathered in apricot jam, in which case it became a heavenly ideal of a donut. to sum up: Salt. Garlic. Or apricot. Full stop. Anything else is heresy against all that is good and holy!
Play it safe: make your own!
Since the end of communism, however, lángos started to get creative: sour cream and cheese appeared as toppings, and a jizz of cloyingly sweet Hungarian Globus ketchup turned it into something of a "Hungarian Pizza." Ham and salami started showing up as toppings, and now the poor lángos has become a baroque satire of the simple peasant market snack it once was.
Downtown Budapest: USD $10-17 for a piece of fried dough
While a normal plain lángos at an open market runs about Forint 600 these days (about $1.75) the price goes up exponentially as it comes in proximity to the tourist crowds. Also: Greek salad on a platform of fried dough? Chicken paprikás? Just how many extra clean shirts did you bring? Tofu stew... appears only in the biblical story of Job when the devil tries to tempt sinless vegans. The worst offender is the lángos stand at the Vámház Ter market, which is actually a great market for buying meat but doubles as a tourist trap. The lángos stand on the upper level offers a lángos topped with banana and brown sugar for Ft 4800. That's like buying a twenty dollar Dunkin Donut.
The Petro Butcher Shop- Szell Kalman ter.
You want a taste of Hungarian street food? You can do what Hungarians do. Either sit down at an étkezde - like the Kádár - and ask the waitress to bring you a plate of classic beef pőrkőlt or strapacska and eat it at your table like a civilized person, or go to a butcher shop and stand up at one of the counters and enjoy a kolbász or a chunk of smoked pork.
Lunch chez Petro
But if you do insist on ordering an overpriced lángos covered in liquid paprika stew, remember to bring an extra clean shirt. You'll thank me.
Scroll back to the first entries of this blog and you find that it was begun as a diary of a trip to Istanbul we made in 2006. Fumie had a job as photographer for the time Out! Travel guidebook to Istanbul, and we spent about two months in the city. It was enough time to get to know the cultural rhythms of the place and pick up a smattering of Turkish language. We traveled to Istanbul a lot in that decade - it was affordable and just a cheap bus ride away from our usual Balkan summer jaunts. and the food was immeasurably better. Its worth checking out those early posts - I looked a lot less like Grandpa Simpson in those days.
Surrounded by attractive people at Çiya Lokantaşı.
It has been over ten years since we were last there, so when Fumie took Turkish Airlines to fly home to Tokyo, she opted for a return stopover in Istanbul, we jumped at the chance to return. My son Aron, who lives in London, joined us. We were only there for four days - not enough. But better than nothing.
Rustem Pasa Mosque
I set myself a few guarded parameters. I was not going to buy a carpet. I was not going to buy a new bağlama saz, any or Pontic bagpipes, or kemençes, not even a tiny three stringed uçtelli saz that can easily fit in hand luggage. I was not going to do any of the things that I did two decades ago when I returned home to Budapest with a small orchestra strapped to my back and a huge Turkmen rug wrapped in the worlds largest plastic shopping bag. I was, however, going to eat as much Turkish food as possible.
Karalahana: Black Sea stuffed collard greens
We were there for the last two days of Ramadan. Many Turks don't have a problem eating during Ramadan, but eating pit roasted lamb in the Kadinlar Pazar (aka, the Siirt Market) in the strongly conservative Muslim Fatih district would have to wait. We ate at at this market for iftar - the nightly feast after a day of Ramadan fasting - back in 2010. Most tourists avoid Fatih, and "cool" people from the trendy neighborhoods would warn us against going there. They were wrong. Sure: you can't buy beer in the neighborhood, but you will find, hard core Anatolian hospitality rules in effect here. You can drink tea.
Kadinlar Pazar: The Baby in the Watermelon Haunts my Nightmares
For the time being, we took the ferry to Kadikoy on the Asian side. Çiya is a restaurant founded by a Turkish chef turned ethnographer which presents dishes collected as folklore through different areas of Turkey. I ate there twenty years ago and have gone back ever since - it rates as one of the world's best restaurants, with absolutely amazing food at normal prices. Over the years Çiya has featured in Anthony Bourdain's show, a Netflix series, and gets written up in all the tourist brochures, but it still keeps high standards and low prices. We had a salad plate of regional specialties, and then some meatballs made with fresh almond fruit, and I - ever adventurous - went for a plate of good old beans.
Çiya salad plate.
We stayed in our old neighborhood of Beyoğlu near the Galata Tower, but the area has since become a victim of over tourism: crowded streets, expensive restaurants pushing out the old neighborhood local kebab shops. Restaurant prices were a bit of a shock: Turkey has had a bad economic year and between inflation and currency devaluation food was up around 130% over last year. Working Istanbullus traditionally eat out during the day and their sticker shock was leading to a lot of small local restaurant shutting down. In the future I would definitely consider staying on the Asian side of Istanbul. Quieter, Cheaper, And some of the best classic Turkish food in town.
Fatih, Kadinlar Pazar
Once Ramadan ended, it was time for Seker Bayram, more widely known as Eid al-Fitr. Celebrating the end of Ramadan, people feast on sweets and for the three day holiday crowds of families go visiting and the guidebooks told us to expect crowds in public transport. They weren't kidding. Everybody was out and gulping baklava and halva from dawn to dusk. We finally made it to Fatih to visit the Kadinlar Pazar, which is a market serving the needs of the southeatern Anatolian internal emmigrants in Istanbul, ringed with restaurants serving the specialties of Siirt, Bitlis, and Mardin: buryan kebab - whole lambs roasted for hours in a pit oven, served simply on Anatolian flat bread and an esme pepper salad. There are few foods I love as much as buryan lamb. Popeye's fried chicken. Sarajevo Cevapcici. Cantonese rice rolls. Maybe Shake Shack burgers. But Buryan wins. I'm already planning to go back.
With only a few days to stay in Istanbul, and city traffic nearly unpassable due to the seething sugar-crazed crowds, I did miss out on seeing any live music. I did encounter some of the most classic Istanbul sounds on record, though. 78 rpm records, in fact. I passed by an antique record shop in Kadikoy and noticed some gramophone discs in the window, walked in, and immediately rediscovered my long gone fluency in Turkish. "Do you have any old Ottoman records? Greek or Armenian music?" and the shop owner sits me down and starts pulling out carefully preserved 100 year old discs, properly stored and protected in new paper sleeves, including classical Turkish recordings by Tamburi Cemil Bey.
Cemil Bey was an Armenian Istanbullu who mainly recorded playing the classical Turkish kemençe, a small three string fiddle played on the knee. In the 19th century, a majority of the musicians playing Turkish classical music were non-Muslims: local Greeks, western Armenians, Jews, and Gypsies. Playing non religious music as a profession was not considered suitable employment for a good Muslim. By the middle of the 19th century this sound had become the contemporary Urban Pop sound of the Black Sea and eastern Mediterranean, which is why so many of the melodies and musical practices of Turkish fasil (light classical) have entered into the repertoires and playing styles of modern Greek Rebetika, Jewish Klezmer, and Armenian halay music. Tamburi Cemil Bey's versions of makam melodies have gone down as the defining versions. His Nikriz longa is still played across the post-Ottoman world.
Modern musicians still adapt Cemil Bey's work. Salih Korkut Peker from Izmir plays a modified electric cumbuş - an oud neck stuck to a banjo body, and changed the rhythm to reggae. This version was my particular ear worm for this year.
No, I didn't buy any of the old records. I am very careful to know my vices, and collecting 78s is not going to become one of them. I know 78 collectors. They are very odd people, often well beyond obsessed, and most of this music can be found on reissues. But that won't stop me from rooting around old record shops. We are already planning to go back in the future. Maybe I'll get one of those Black Sea bagpipes yet.
Who even reads blogs anymore? Ok, you do, obviously, but the Golden Age of blogging joined the fate of the Wooly Mammoths over a decade ago with the ascendancy of Tumblr, Facebook, Insta, TikTok, and Twitter (now known as Elon's Edsel.) Users of social media no longer consume prose. They like captions, blurbs, viral visuals. Its a trend that I discovered back when working as a print journalist. Publishers began demanding blurbs, not feature articles. More photos, less words. Small local newspapers fell like flies. Finally, Capitalist God declared a pox on all their houses, and print media - along with its modest paychecks - went the way of the ocelot (i.e: its still there but you can't see it.)
Gone but not forgotten
I began blogging back in 2004 after reading a NewYorker article while flying from NY to Budapest. Thought I'd give it a try. It was an easy way to keep in touch with friends and share photos and stories of our first trips to Istanbul, where Fumie was working as a photographer for Time Out travel guides, (a great travel series that was eventually replaced by an ingominous "app".) And then I kept it up. The end result is that I have a non-comprehensive diary of various crap that I engaged in for the last twenty years. I have visual documentation of nearly every pastrami sandwich I have eaten in the last two decades.
I used to write for and edit the culture section of Budapest Week - Hungary's first privately run English language weekely newspaper begun in 1991. The saga of BP Week remains to be written, perhaps someday when all the bodies are finally buried, but suffice to say I enjoyed being read by a few thousands of folks weekly - folks I would often meet later at then flourishing Budapest alternative bars like Tilos Az A, the Raczkert, Picasso Point, and the unforgettable bar "A Széklet" ('the stool sample.') There was evidence that real flesh and blood people read the stuff that I - under numerous assumed names and aliases - wrote.
This was often pleasant, and when it wasn't, it didn't matter because by then I was drunk and belligerent. But I really liked knowing who was reading me. It felt like real communication. Later I wrote for email newslists, magazines, travel guides, even a series of educational readers for American teens. Blogging was like my personal writing excercise space. But in the glory days I could clock in over a thousand readers a day. Nowadays, readership rarely hits double figures.
Perhaps my masterpiece
Budapest Week folded due to gross mismanagement and fraud, and subsequent attempts to revive it failed due to gross incompetance but mainly fraud. Most of the publishing industry in Hungary fails due to corruption and fraud. Heck, we can extend this to explain the failure of business in Hungary in general - note that Hungary has recently slipped behind Romania in the lower rungs of economic vitality in the European Union. Does this sound like a swan song to blogging? A dear John letter to blogspot? Naaaah... not happening. I am way too narcissistic to shut up entirely. I simply do not update the blog every three days like I once did. I'm older and time moves more slowly. My advancing dotage no longer merits the kind of adventure that I once spent so much time pursuing. (To quote the song: "Its getting to the point where I'm no fun anymore. And I am sorry.")
My idea of fun
And I don't care to write much or comment much on the contemporary Hungarian society I live in. If you read the news you can find a lot about our Prime Minister and his policies. You don't need me for that. Every time I read the NY times or the Guardian and they call Orban a fascist I want to rush to the keyboard and spew out an eloquent rebuttal: He's not a fascist! He's just a common garden variety capital-A asshole! His henchmen are a bunch of high school bullies and lickspittles and corrupt wheeler dealers, but they don't have the competence to rate the label of "fascist." It deflates the power behind the term "fascism." Heck, he barely holds a candle to Trump! The young Viktor Orban initially hoped to become a professional football player in Hungary. He was rejected because he was too short, so he got into the ELTE Law School instead. Orban doesn't model his style of government on Mussolini or the Nazis. He models it on FIFA, the international body governing professional football (soccer to us yanks) which is known for deep pocket corruption, quisling politics, and a relationship to its players that evokes high stakes serfdom. If you want to know how Hungary is governed, look at the worst aspects of international football. Viktor Orban may have graduated from the ELTE Law school, but he spent at least an hour a day playing soccer in the Law school dormitory backyard, and believe me, he does not like to lose. I know. I was the resident English teacher at the dorm (albeit a year after Orban had graduated, but he still showed up for games.)
One of my lesser known works
But I digress.
People ask why I remain in Budapest. My answer is that much of what originally drew me here is still here. I arrived at the end of communism, so I am used to living under a deeply cynical incompetant government that has no program except the maintanance of its power. The extreme polarization that characterizes Hungarian politics and social life is not of my making. I only live in it, but I am not of it. What really kept me here were my friends, mostly folk musicians, and the traditional music that consumed their lives. Although that music is mostly found in Transylvania, across the border in Romania, I have lived most of my adult life in Budapest and this is the city I call home. I like the food, although I no longer enjoy it as I once did (I lost a lot of weight this year by avoiding carbs, and that includes bakeries.) I can finally ride the metro for free! I can get Serbian radio on AM. And I do not watch Hungarian TV, for the same reason I do not watch professional wrestling. I can live my life without Kayfabe. I like the real thing, and I know where I can find it.
Ioan "Nuku" Harleț. Budești, Romania. It don't get realer.
This said, I can happily get on a plane next week and fly off to Istanbul, the city where this blog began 18 years ago. My son is coming to meet us there and I can't wait to take him around to places where the public bathroom may well have been built in Byzantine times, where the lowliest kebab shop is better than the best food in London, and where the best roast lamb on the face of the planet can be found (the Kadinlar Pazar in Fatih!) So expect a bit more from the blog in the weeks ahead.
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