Postcards of Memory - from Debrecen (1)

1. An Old Yard


Take a seat, enjoy an ice-cream or coffee on the terrace of the cake-shop
inside Udvarház ("Courtyard-house"). Around you, there are boutiques, a pizza-bar, an antique shop, a bookshop; and above you, above this nicely paved yard-like little square, the yellow tower of the symbol of this town, of the historic Nagytemplom (Great Church) is reaching up to the sky. You are sitting right in the heart of the town.
In the centre of my childfood, too. Some forty years ago there used to be a yard here covered with earth, where I played soccer with my brothers from spring to autumn. In winter we built a snow-hut, we carried water by the buckets to our self-made skate-ring, and when spring came we helped my father to dig up our vegetable-garden so that we could pick tomatoes and green paprika for breakfast all through summer. Exactly where you are sitting now, right here, there once used to be an old, uninhabited wooden pigsty (without a pig by that time), concealed by locust sprouts; a thorns-hidden, moss-covered castle of the sleeping princess Rose Bud, a perfect spot to play for us kids in the yard.
Not all parts of Debrecen have changed this much. The park of "Great Woods"with its lake for rowing boats, the zoo, the soccer stadium, the swimming-pool underneath oak trees - they look almost the same. The university, too, looks the same; situated partly in the park, partly in the woods; this beautiful building that used to induce a special feeling in me each time I stepped in through its gate.