I could do this forever. From the armchair or preferably on the road. At some point while developing my itinerary for the lost lands beyond Hungary’s borders, I became entranced by the idea of spending weeks, months, years, going from one place to the next and finding anything of interest related to the multi-ethnic history of Burgenland. The idea of doing this has brought me to a point of complete intoxication. All I need is curiosity and a map. There are an infinite number of places, people, events, and topics waiting to be explored. A multiplicity of details worthy of investigation in the pursuit of greater truths past and present. Burgenland is first and foremost on my mind at this moment. That is bound to change whenever I step across the next border. The languages and cultures may shift, but my focus remains the same. To experience and learn everything possible while on this ever-expanding journey.
While the history I am pursuing is very old, it is all new to me. I have no prior association with the lost lands other than the few months I have spent in them over the past twelve years. And yet I feel a deeply personal connection with these regions. An intuition that makes my curiosity come alive. The only way I can explain this urgent obsession is to say that it feels like the first time you fall in love. It is unlike anything you have ever experienced before or ever will again. You cannot imagine what it was like before falling in love, and you cannot imagine what it would be like to fall out of that love. You are smitten. Only later do you realize that the object of affection is something you cannot live without. This is followed by the perpetual fear that one day you could lose it all. And that day you will lose it all.
Golden path – Birch trees at a park in Burgenland
Visiting Rights – A Canvas For Curiosity
The lost lands are a vast canvas where my curiosity is set free. While maps make the lost lands look finite, in the mental makeup of those who long to have them back, they go on forever. Officially, they are all the lands Hungary lost due to the Treaties of Trianon and St. Germain-en-Laye. Another, way of defining them is that they are all the lands surrounding the borders of present-day Hungary, and then some. In certain places those lands expand, such as from the Crisana to Transylvania in Romania or from the Danube in southern Slovakia to the Polish border. In the Burgenland, they are a narrow strip of land stretching from the edge of Bratislava all the way down to the Croatian border. Not unlike a defile that empires, nations, and peoples have fallen into. They have spent over a century trying to pull themselves back out of that defile. Try as they might, the force of geopolitical gravity pulls them back down.
Everyone has their limit, but the lost lands do not. Their spiritual existence is much larger and stronger than their physical one. Imagine living in a country that is besieged on all sides by its own past. They get to see their ex being repeatedly ravished by someone else. The European Union has given them visiting rights, but even that has prolonged the suffering. The relationship between past and present never made a clean break. Rather than a fresh start, there is a festering wound. One that no amount of fury, resolve or romanticism will ever cure. Time does not heal all wounds. In the lost lands it has hardened them, except in a couple of unique cases. The most noticeable of these is the Burgenland.
On the border – Map showing the location of Burgenland
The Happy Face – Well Above Average
Burgenland is the closest thing to a happy face that anyone could put on Trianon. All the boxes have been checked by Austria. Minority rights, check. Prosperity, check. Assimilation and allowance for differences, check. If the ethnic minorities they inherited cannot be Austrians, at least they will be good Europeans. The situation is as good as it will get for ethnic Hungarians and Croatians. The Austrian government implicitly asks nothing more than that they abide by the law, work hard, and enjoy the benefits that the creation of wealth bequeaths to all the citizens of Austria. Why make trouble, when there is none. Go about your business and everything will work out for the best. I doubt many ethnic Hungarians or Croatians in the Burgenland care to dredge up the ghosts of Trianon. Where would they go with historical grievances except back across the Hungarian border. That is a chance few would care to take. This is the paradox of being part of the ethnic minority abandoned by force of a treaty. The country which adopted them was better than the one they were meant to call their own. .
The Austrians made a beautiful world out of the Burgenland. It is also different in many respects from the rest of the country. Burgenland comes with wine rather than beer, castles and palaces that look like they were built for tourists rather than wars, Hungarians and Croatians who speak fluent German and do not mind doing so. Burgenland ranks last in GDP per person in Austria, and the standard of living is well above average. The mountains are low, the forests are tame, the ground fertile. This is a part of Austria that defies its popular image. One where foreigners are few, and the wanderer is left to their own devices. A lost land that no one is looking to recover. These paradoxes and contradictions are sources of exhilaration that inform my latest obsession. I long to make a separate peace with the Burgenland.
The unknown Austria – Water well and thatched structure in Burgenland (Credit: Corradox)
The Outlier – A Breed Apart
I never cared for Austria before the Burgenland. It was a nation that adhered to the straight and narrow. Stiff, stodgy, and snobbish. The finer things in life honed to their sharpest image and then ground down to extreme dullness. Burgenland is a breed apart. Something about it does not feel completely Austrian to me. I suspect it has something to do with the lost lands. A legacy it wears so lightly that it barely ever gets noticed. It is that legacy which is luring me onward to a place called Parndorf.
Click here for: Kuruzzenschanze – Tracing A Path To Parndorf (The Lost Lands #43)
Europe Between East And West 