Péter Apor

Metamorphosis Transylvaniae

(1736)

Excerpts

After the Battle of Mohács in August 1526 most of Central Hungary became part of the Ottoman Empire. An unstable, ill-defined and ill-defended area to the west and north-west of Turkish Hungary came under Austrian rule and became known as Royal Hungary, as the reigning Habsburg, Ferdinand I, had claimed the Hungarian crown on the death at Mohács of Louis II. To the east Transylvania, a Hungarian territory for more than 500 years, was relatively undisturbed; not on the line of the Turkish thrust into western Europe, it was strategically less important to the Turks than the Great Plain. Thus Transylvania developed a significant degree of independence. Its rulers were elevated from the rank of vajda or viceroy (which they had held under the Hungarian kings) to fejedelem or prince, and although nominally subject to distant Vienna and obliged to foster good relationships with the Turks - the approval of the Sultan, and in some cases his direct intervention, was needed to secure election to the throne - they were largely able to conduct their own affairs.
The independent Principality did not have a troublefree existence. Some twenty princes reigned in its 180 years, several of them only briefly. People happily forgot in the early eighteenth century that for much of the duration of the Principality there had been wars, political struggles, epidemics following military campaigns, and great loss of life - all of which had affected most of all the Hungarian population rather than the Saxons or Romanians. Nevertheless, at the same time independent Translvania became a repository of Hungarian tradition, and was preferred to Royal Hungary as the destination of refugees from Turkish Hungary. Religious tolerance was conspicuous, and cultural life showed no sign of decline. Great efforts were made to sustain schools and to found new ones, and to visit foreign universities; the best Transylvanian minds were involved in European intellectual movements, and libraries came into being. There was also a passion for building, which produced numerous fine churches and mansions in the Transylvanian Baroque, and a flowering of sculpture and portraiture.
After the failure of their second siege of Vienna in 1683, the Turks' power waned rapidly. In 1686 an allied army drove them from the old Hungarian capital of Buda, and their ejection from the former territory of the Hungarian Crown was completed
in 1699 with the Treaty of Karlowitz. Even before that, however, in 1686 Prince Michael I Apaffi handed back Transylvania to the Hungarian crown, then worn by the Austrian Leopold I. This led to the government of Transylvania directly from Vienna rather than from Buda, the incursion of large numbers of Austrian troops, and the giving of a considerable impetus to the Roman Catholic Church. This state of affairs was widely resented and the sluggish, phlegmatic Leopold made himself highly unpopular; there followed an armed rebellion under the last Prince of Transylvania, Francis II Rákóczi, which lasted from 1704 until 1711. His forces - the kuruc - were defeated when French and Russian support was withdrawn, leaving the Austrians firmly in command. Many Hungarians found their rule as distasteful as that of the Turks.

Baron Péter Apor's Metamorphosis Transylvaniae* is one of a number of autobiographical works written by Transylvanian aristocrats in the early eighteenth century, at the end of the Principality's brief period of virtual independence. Usually these give an account of the writer's life and times, and are a valuable source of historical and political detail. Apor's work, however, is different. Completed in 1736, it sets out neither to discuss politics nor even to tell the story of its author's life, though he mentions incidents enough, but rather to commemorate social practices familiar to him as a boy in the last years of the Principality, which, he fears, the influence of the neue Mode brought in by the Austrians may cause to be forgotten. He therefore recalls in detail - both from personal experience and sometimes quite openly from hearsay - various aspects of the aristocratic Transylvanian life of the closing years of the seventeenth century.
Born in 1676 into an ancient aristocratic family in Altorja (Turia) in the Székely region of eastern Transylvania, young Péter lost his father to the plague in the year of his birth and was brought up by his uncle, Count István Apor. This was a man of great importance in public life: foýispán (Lord Lieutenant) of Kükülloý County, he was a member of the Prince's Council and at one time Treasurer of Transylvania, and so Péter moved in the highest circles from his early youth. A Catholic, he was educated first in the Jesuit college at Kolozsvár (Cluj) and then at the Royal Hungarian University of Nagyszombat (Trnava in Slovakia, which transferred to Pest in 1784 eventually to become the present Eötvös Loránd University). There he studied law and philosophy in preparation for a career in public service, which he began in 1709, not before a period of almost two years' imprisonment on (unfounded) suspicion of involvement in the kuruc resistance to Habsburg rule. He served as foýispán of Kükülloý County and Chief Justice of his native region of Háromszék, himself attaining the rank of Baron.
The Metamorphosis was not Apor's only book. He also produced a history of his family, written in Latin and entitled Lusus mundi (1727); a blend of biography and history - also in Latin - entitled Synopsis mutationum notabilium (1749); and two collections of Hungarian poems on noble families: Syllabus mortuorum about persons who had died, and Syntagma et syllabus vivorum about those still alive. He also left a version of the Metamorphosis in Hungarian verse, and a quantity of correspondence. The Metamorphosis, however, is beyond doubt Apor's best work; such he considered it himself, and it is this that has earned him a place of honour in the annals of Hungarian literature. It remained in manuscript in family hands until its publication in 1863 by Gábor Kazinczy in Pest.

Nostalgia is the keynote of the Metamorphosis. Apor yearns for the good old days which, he knows, are gone for ever, but which, thanks to him, have not been forgotten. He gives the impression of a lost golden age in the 'fairyland'
of Transylvania which ended shortly after his birth, when all was morally and materially superior to the time in which he writes.
Not all, however, is in a fretful tone. Much of the material presented is pure social history, such as the account of how a young nobleman would find a wife, with a good humoured tale of the procedure and the jokes played on the suitor, ending with a detailed account of the wedding itself. The same is true (without, of course, the humorous element) of the customs surrounding the funerals of the upper classes, and it is clear to the reader that Apor thoroughly enjoyed a nice example of the ceremonial. His accounts of traditional dress, travel and vehicles are also very detailed, while the text is punctuated by a number of atrocious puns.
This very distinctive work, then, holds a high place in the Hungarian literature of its time. The poet, novelist and essayist Dezsoý Kosztolányi says of it two centuries later:

Imagine a proud but now embittered, constantly quarrelsome, crusty grouser of an elderly nobleman, who feels that the end of the world is nigh and turns his gaze inward, directs it upon the past, to the time when Transylvania was free and independent. Everything that he can see externally is shoddy, inferior and tatty. Everything that he can see internally, in his soul, is perfect, faultless, a veritable fairy dream. This is a historical work, in which he describes nothing but luncheons, dinners, notable weddings and funerals, but in its tone there is literature, poetry. That he had created something of value he suspected himself.

Péter Apor died in 1752, almost blind, and isolated from society by his incompatibility with it.

Bernard Adams

Chapter the First

...

Although Count István Apor was my father's brother, I write without flattery, he lived like a real count; for every day there were regularly laid out eighty-eight silver dishes and as many silver plates, and they were as thick as dishes and plates of pewter; for him and his wife the table was laid with gold spoons, and the plates were of silver, square, with a gilt rim two fingers wide. He had a silver wine-cooler, very big, into which a six-year-old child could have fitted; it was gilded [at the brim] a palm-width within and without, had been brought from Vienna and cost three thousand Austrian florins. He had land in many parts of Transylvania and used to sow five thousand three hundred köböl of autumn wheat; he had so much wine in many places that it filled a few thousand veder, and from that he used to present not only his stepson Zsigmond Korda and the Altorja branch of the Apor family with forty or fifty full forty-veder barrels, but
also the principal servants around him. He grazed his cattle and horses near the village of Szentjakab in the Mezoýség, on the pasture known as the Boduc, and went there in the autumn, had his beasts and horse-herds driven forth, inspected them, and presented his servants with eighteen or twenty such colts as were sold for sixty or sometimes eighty forints. Every year he went to the fair in Medgyes on St Margaret's day, if he was in good health, because there he settled accounts with the tradesmen who owed him money; then he would have brought up five or six bolts of English cloth and would distribute them as gifts to his relatives and servants, to some giving seven ells, that is, enough for a whole mantle, and to others cloth for a mente, a dolmány or for trousers. He would wear an outfit for three or four months, then would call in some deserving servant of his and present him with that entire outfit: a mente decorated with the best fox-fur, a dolmány, trousers, a hat trimmed with pine-marten that he had worn himself, sometimes with the silken girdle that he had worn over it all, everything.
He had about eighty permanent servants or more, sometimes a hundred; their wages alone, if I remember correctly, came to four thousand six hundred odd florins a year in cash, and in addition there was English cloth, fine, double-fulled London cloth for a mantle; half of their wages was always paid on St John's day and the other half at Christmas to the last penny; in addition he provided his mounted servants with hay and fodder for their horses; he had fifteen permanent mounted servants, and the wages of each were a hundred florins together with seven ells of cloth; likewise he kept three trumpeters and their wages were as much, with three ejtel of wine daily; of the others, some were paid eighty florins, some sixty, the grooms forty, the stewards thirty, the coachmen twelve and the outriders six, and in addition to each according to his station cloth for a mantle and boots.
Sometimes there were so many servants, and yet so plentifully were they provided at both luncheon and dinner, both at home and abroad, even when there were no guests at the long table, that all that great quantity of good food, cooked in Hungarian style, could never be consumed but was given plates and all to the greyhounds and staghounds. When it was time for luncheon or dinner the head cook rang a little bell that hung outside the kitchen and all the many servants would gather, so many that there was hardly room for them in the dining room, and sometimes the coachmen, outriders, stablemen, cooks, kitchen servants, watchmen, guards and other such servants of lower rank could not enter. In his later years, for the sake of the Austrians, he kept a famous Austrian cook too, whose wages were a hundred Austrian florins, seven ells of London cloth, boots, two forty-veder barrels of wine, twelve köböl of wheat, three fatted pigs, and in addition oatmeal, peas and the like.
On his property at Kece alone he kept eighteen ample farm wagons, with six oxen each and thirty-six farmhands with them; his ox-stalls stood along a goodly stretch of the Maros; when the oxen were driven to water in the Maros you would have thought that the oxen of a whole village were being driven down.
In addition there was the chaplain's handsome stipend and his mantle; as his wife was a Calvinist, the same for her minister.
Apart from that of Gabriel Bethlen, you never heard such a will in Transylvania as his; for ad pias causas alone he bequeathed a hundred and twenty thousand forints, and in addition much more to his wife, his kinsmen and others. If only his property had remained intact; but through the rebellions of Imre Thököly and Prince Francis Rákóczi he sustained losses as great as the above-mentioned wealth, which wealth, if it could have remained intact, his posterity would certainly have been lords today.
I have not written a great amount since I am his kinsman; I surely write that you may ponder much more, dear reader.

...

Then when the guests of the bridegroom and of the bride's father and mother had feasted, and fruit had been removed (and the fruit was all in silver or, more often, gilded dishes; you would also have seen there all sorts of jams, Turkish and Venetian sweets of sugar-cane, and among the sweetmeats large golden pastries too), they rose from the table, the tables were removed from the hall, and the chief steward would open the dancing with fine ceremonies and bendings of the knee. In the first dance the master of ceremonies danced with the matron of honour, the bride with the groom and the best man with the bridesmaid. When these couples had danced three rounds, the second dance was that of the bride's father, who danced with her mother, and two couples of their children if they had them, and if not then the nearest couple of their relatives; after that they danced in order. After that followed the Polish változó, sometimes the Mouse Dance and the Hat Dance, and after those the Spade Dance, after which another two or three dances. Meanwhile the bride was taken to a separate room and there dressed afresh in a pure white gown, or if she had previously been wearing white, usually in green (though I have seen her in other colours too); take note that when she was brought out and shown the gifts by the best man she wore one gown, when she was brought to the table she wore another, and when she was taken away a third, so that on her wedding-day the bride was in three different outfits; her hair was unbraided and allowed to hang loose down her back and ornamented with a bright, narrow ribbon which also hung low. Before she had worn on her head a wreath with fine pearls and precious stones, but now a wreath of flowers was placed on her head, and thus changed she was taken out to the hall. When she appeared the fiddlers at once struck up the bride-dance, and the bride was handed to the master of ceremonies, who took two or three turns with her and taking her by the hand led her to where her father, mother and relatives were standing, and she took her leave of them. It was often the custom that the master of ceremonies did not cause the bride to take her leave at that moment, but on the third day, when the whole wedding party was about to leave (remember here that on the first day of the wedding the bride danced not a step, but went to whom she was given and only walked). But when the master of ceremonies did cause the bride to take leave of her father and mother on the wedding-day, then she fell on her knees before them and prostrated first at her father's feet, then at her mother's, and the master of ceremonies made her take leave of them and thank them before all for bringing her up as parents and taking care of her, and for now having honourably found her a husband; with that she would kiss her father and mother's hands, sometimes their feet too, and they would kiss their daughter. Then the master of ceremonies would place her in the hands of the best man, he would dance a turn with her, and at once young men, usually six, plumed, would stand before her, each with a great burning torch in his hand, and would precede the best man, and after him a few couples would dance, immediately behind him the matron of honour hand in hand with the bridesmaid, and a further three couples. When they had danced the third round a sign was given and the young men with the torches would make for the door in great haste, almost running, the best man would lead the bride after them, the matron of honour and bridesmaid following hand in hand, and the bride was escorted to the bridegroom's bed-chamber; the best man presented her to the bridegroom, pronounced fine blessings upon them, and then the best man drew his sword and cut the wreath from the bride's head and let it slide down to the hilt, the sword being drawn (that was in order that the bride should remember that as the sword had removed the sign of her virginity, she should so conduct herself in holy wedlock that if she dishonoured that estate a sword should be on her head); then the best man bade the newly-weds good night and, taking the bridesmaid by the hand, with drawn sword and preceded by the torch-bearers returned to the wedding-hall. The matron of honour undressed the bride, and the best man danced two or three turns with the bridesmaid and then threw the wreath off his sword onto the ground and cut it into four, signifying that the bride's maidenhood was now ended; then they bade one another good night. But all this taking away of the bride and going to bed took place towards dawn; and if there were cannon, howitzers or arquebuses, these fired a mighty fusillade when the bride was taken to the groom.