Esztergom

That's Estragam for all your Americans out there. And it's the seat of the Hungarian Catholic Church andthe place where all of Hungary's monarch's were crowned.

Imagine a city that was in its full glory in 1000.  St. Istvan was crowned there, the Primate of the church lived there, riches flowed in on the Danube, the country's mint was there.  It was a center of government, church, culture, wealth, not just for Hungary, but for that part of Europe.  It saw kings crowned, money flowing, the church wealthy in riches and power.

In those days there weren't railroads and superhighways.  You have to remember the rivers were the highways.  Imagine the Danube in her day.  Picture the ships she carried, imagine the destinations they reached.

The Esztergom of today is a little town, but one with grand old buildings and a beautiful basilica atop a hill, and you can imagine the ships coming in on the Danube and the streets flowing with people and horses and  gold.

There is a Christian Art Museum in Esztergom, and it contains a piece called the Holy Selphuchre of Garamszentbenedek.  It's a gold-painted wagon shaped like a cathedral with carvings of the Apostles and the Roman soldiers guarding Christ's tomb.  It was used during Easter Week processionals.  I imagined it proceeding through the streets, pulled by black horses, people flanking the roads to watch it go by.  I kept walking up and down those streets with the pastel painted buildings imagining the city in its former glory.

Here is a link to the Museum.

http://www.christianmuseum.hu/

Here are some photographs of the Lord's Coffin, as they translate it.

The Lord's Coffin

The Lord's Coffin-Upper Portion

The Lord's Coffin-Lower Portion

I'd like to say a word about medieval art.  When you see medieval art I think it's strikingly clear how much closer Life and Death, Heaven and Hell, were to those people.  They depict the Virgin with a baby in her stomach, they show the bones and skulls on Golgotha. Christ's wounds spurt blood and his face is wan and drawn, the face of a corpse more than that of a man. If you think about it, today we are protected by antibiotics, hospitals, air conditioning.  In those days, simply giving birth could bring death. People lived so much more closely to the edge of things, and I believe you can see this depicted in the art.

As I said above, today it's a quaint, quiet old town.  A place where tourists come to visit and nothing more, but it's easy to imagine all that it was, and it's easy to understand why places like that should be preserved, so people can understand their own past.

Two Chinamen, behind them a third,

Are carved in lapis lazuli,

Behind them flies a long legged bird,

The symbol of longevity;

A third, doubtless a serving man'

Carries a musical instrument.

Every discoloration of the stone,

Every accidental crack or dent,

Seems a water-course or an avalanche,

Or lofty slope where it still snows

Though doubtless plumb or cherry-branch

Sweetens the little half-way house

Those Chinamen climb towards, and I

Delight to imagine them seated there;

There, on the mountain and the sky,

On all the tragic scene they stare.

One calls for mournful melodies;

Accomplished fingers begin to play.

Their eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes,

Their ancient glittering eyes are gay.

No, I did not compose that.  I merely memorized it and typed it up.  William Butler Yeats said it.  Those words come to me unbidden when I see great monuments of the past that have been restored.  The Basilica in Esztergom is one such example.

I was also struck by the Maria Valeria Bridge which crosses the Danube and crosses the border into Slovakia.  It was destroyed in 1944 and rebuilt in 2001.

I love it how these bridges are not left destroyed but are built up again.  When I visited Mostar, Bosnia in 2008 I was enthralled by the story of how the old bridge there, which had been built in medieval times, was destroyed in the Bosnian War, and how the villagers pulled the stones out of the river and rebuilt it.  And when I was there there were a bunch of Bosnian men in Speedos jumping off it, which seems to be a popular form of local amusement.