Summer Reading: The Stars of Eger by Géza Gárdonyi

Alex Faludy reads a Hungarian classic.

High summer is a time when many people luxuriate in the freedom to enjoy focused reading, whether at a hotel pool side, the shores of Lake Balaton or elsewhere. This year, my own deep dive has been into the pages of Géza Gárdonyi’s (1863-1922) epic 550-page The Stars of Eger (Egri csillagok) — a swashbuckling adventure novel set during the decades of the Turkish conquest of Hungary.

First published in newspaper serial form 1899-1901, and immediately thereafter as a standalone volume, it’s been available in English since 1991 as Eclipse of the Crescent Moon (trans. George Cushing). A staple of Hungary’s national curriculum, for many children it is the first full-length literary work which they’ll encounter around the age of 11.

The novel’s summit, as the title suggests, is the 1552 siege of Eger. During the latter, in an astounding triumph of military science and strategy, the Hungarian commander Baron István Dobó (1502-72) and his garrison of around 2000 soldiers held off a vastly larger Turkish force. In Gárdonyi’s time, the opposing army was reckoned at between 150,000 to 200,000. Today, military historians put it at between 35,000 - 40,000. Either way, as a feat of arms, the defence remains impressive.

The tale of the siege begins only in the second half of the book. Until then, the main focus is on the adventures and sufferings of the (real) scholar-soldier Gergely Bornemissza (1526–55) and his (fictional) childhood sweetheart, later wife, Éva Cecey.

The Star’s sprawling plot is near impossible to summarise. It’s circularity and repetition partly reflects disrupted composition by Gárdonyi and partly the pressure of the original format: newspaper serials were the soap operas of their day. A uniting thread, however, is provided by the ongoing sub-plot of Gergely and Éva’s struggle with a fictional private nemesis: a Turkish soldier-mystic Jumurdzsák —a conflict which personalises the Magyar-Ottoman struggle.

First Jumurdzsák temporarily captures Gergely and Eva as children but rapidly finds himself outwitted by his prisoners and bereft of his precious luck-conferring talisman: a ring set with crescent and stars.

Jumurdzsák’s thirst to recover the charm takes him on a wide-ranging pursuit of his former prisoners: hunting them through the Balkans and as far as Istanbul. The quest drives Jumurdzsák to desperate means: kidnapping Gergely and Éva’s young child (János) who he seeks to barter for his own lost treasure at the gates of Eger.

Ironically, amidst the desperate search for his lucky talisman, Jumurdzsák’s own luck runs out, fatally. His inability to capture the metal ring echoes in miniature the failure of the Ottoman troops to take the ringed fortifications of the castle itself.

The work’s strength stems from two principal sources. First, despite some extraneous padding, many passages have a forceful narrative thrust which is hard to resist. Second, the vivid descriptions of the battle at Eger: Gárdonyi’s evocation of hellish scenes involving fire, blood and scorching, especially at night, are powerfully arresting.

This probably reflects his past accomplishment as a translator, if a somewhat free one, of Dante’s Inferno into Hungarian (1894). For some while, Gárdonyi became a Dante obsessive. For Hungary’s Millennial Exhibition (1896), he designed a huge ‘Dante Panorama’ comparable to Árpád Feszty’s (1856-1914) giant cyclorama, The Arrival of the Hungarians.

Unlike Feszty’s project, however, Gárdonyi’s attraction was poorly co-ordinated with the patriotic thrust of the millennial celebrations. The Dante Panorama proved a flop, and Gárdonyi’s creditors seized most of his possessions. The infernal siege scenes of The Stars of Eger represent a happier synthesis between his Italian interests and his Hungarian context.

Géza Gárdonyi in 1921. Source: Wikipedia

True love of country is a key theme in The Stars. Perhaps this helps explain its abiding popularity with 20th-century Hungarian audiences tossed by geopolitical shock. Moreover, The Stars is set in a Hungary divided (between Austrians, Turks and Hungarians), but whose unity the hero-protagonists hope to recover. Such a scenario would have resonated with interwar readers battling with Trianon-trauma.

In 1923, a silent movie adaptation was produced by far-right publicist and politician Tibor Eckhardt with the explicit aim of boosting national morale. Long thought lost, fragments have recently been discovered and donated to the National Film Institute.

How exactly Gárdonyi conceived of Hungarian identity is hard to discern. In The Stars, it appears as something on the one hand powerful and, on the other, arbitrary or constructed.

Thus, we meet various characters who are ‘ex-Hungarians’, including Jumurdzsák himself: janissaries taken as children by the Ottomans. They may still speak Hungarian, but they lack fellow feeling with the inhabitants of the land they plunder.

In a nod to Gárdonyi’s own Swab parentage (his original surname was Ziegler), the loyalty of local ethnic-Germans to Hungary over and against the Habsburgs is affirmed: “I’m not an Austrian, nor is the Danube Austrian when it reaches Hungarian soil,” one character announces indignantly. National identity here sounds like a question of voluntary choice, not biology.

Yet there are limits to this openness: Roma characters are relentlessly portrayed as mentally deficient and practically unassimilable, a foil bolstering Hungarians’ sense of superiority. The unreliability of a treacherous Hungarian nobleman (Móre) is signalled repeatedly via reference to his dark skin and gypsy-like features. Jews, oddly, are nowhere to be seen.

For those interested in Gárdonyi’s classic work, but intimidated by its length, a handy substitute is offered by the 1968 colour film version (2hrs 25 mins) directed by Zoltán Várkonyi and starring Imre Sinkovits, István Kovács, and Vera Venczel. The production epitomised a subtle shift in Communist cultural policy: allowing greater room for traditional expressions of patriotism and national belonging.

Várkonyi managed a great achievement in reducing the plot to digestible simplicity and staged an impressive feast of music and costume. Yet there is also a Cold-War ideological twist: Várkonyi (twice a judge at the Moscow International Film Festival) adds a strain of anti-clericalism absent from the original. Friars, bishops, and even the Pope appear repeatedly as betrayers of the Hungarian people and authors of the country’s misfortune. The (devoutly Catholic) Gárdonyi would doubtless have been appalled.

Alex Faludy