In March 2018 the Hungarian Government decided to acquire approx. 1.300m2 of the Andrássy palota from the 1st District Municipality and from the City of Budapest (decree 1087/2018 III 13) for the exclusive use of the Andrássy Memorial Museum to be run by the Hungarian National Museum with the co-operation of AGyA. The decision was strengthened by a further decree (1081/2018 XII 21) in December 2018 which confirmed deadlines by which the property must become available. The transfer of ownership took place 31st December 2018. The Budavári Művelődési Ház which occupies part of this space will move out by the end of 2020 to a magnificent building – the former Polgári Casino at Krisztina tér 1 – which is being completely re-built for them.
Bem rakpart with the Andrássy palace in 1894. Source: Fortepan/Kiss László, nr: 93368 (detail)
The space acquired by the state of 390m2 approx. on the first floor accessed by a grand staircase comprises the main salons which will form the core of the permanent museum dedicated to Andrássy Gyula, Andrássy Tivadar his elder son, supporter of the Applied Arts Museum and patron of painter József Rippl-Rónai, and Andrássy Gyula his younger brother who was the last foreign minister of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and a famous connoisseur and art collector. A replica of the unique secessionist Rippl-Rónai dining room commissioned by Andrássy Tivadar in 1897 will also be sited in this area containing the iconic tapestry of Andrássy Tivadar’s wife, Zichy Eleonóra, “ The lady in a red dress”.
József Rippl-Rónai -Lazarine Baudrion: Lady in red dress, 1898
This part of the museum will occupy about 30% of the total space. More than double this – approx. 800m2, the entire ground floor – will be occupied by the museum dedicated to temporary exhibitions and the sustainable support for this comprising offices for researchers and specialists working on the processing and digitisation of the Andrássy Archives, museum staff, exhibition hall of 110m2, visitor center and sponsors club and an office for AGyA. The business plan of the Memorial Museum incorporates regular temporary exhibitions which will be of interest to a contemporary visitor group in particular younger people familiar with digital and virtual reality technology and sponsored primarily by foreign entities.
In early 2018 the Andrássy Gyula Foundation received the authorization from the Department of Public Records and Registries of the Slovak Ministry of Interior to digitize the entire unique Andrássy family archive which commences in 1290 and comprises over one million pieces, and covers the period up to approximately 1946. Based in the Archive at Levoča (Slovakia), the material comes principally from the former Andrássy properties of Krasznahorka (Krásna Hôrka) and Betlér (Betliar) (both of which are popular museums open to the public).
Main building of the Slovak National Archives in Levoča/Lőcse housing the Andrássy family archive
The goal of the trip was to size up the hitherto unresearched archives of the Andrássy family at Levoča (Lőcse) (which is part of the Slovak National Archives) and to lay the groundwork for a cooperation agreement whereby this collection of documents could be researched. The documents of the Andrássy family’s Krásna Hôrka (Krasznahorka) branch may be researched, whilst those of the Betliar (Betlér) branch may not, because the collection has not been catalogued up to now.
Starting from the 13th century (the earliest document dates to 1293), the papers show in detail the Andrássy family’s economic, cultural and political activities and it opens a window on to the family’s official and private correspondence. The day-to-day management of the estates can be traced through the various contracts, legal documents, maps etc. The Andrássy archives are a unique, unchartered repository of Hungarian and Central European history and culture. Not only due to the activities of Gyula Andrássy Senior, the first Hungarian prime minister of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, but also due to the political and cultural activities of some of the other members of the family. As an example, György, Manó and Dénes Andrássy were all close friends of István Széchenyi and were heavily involved in the modernization initiatives.
The other goal of the trip was to visit the various Andrássy properties which today operate as museums.
Inside the Andrássy château in Betliar (from the left: museum director Gyula Bárczi, chairman Mark Odescalchi, prof. Norman Stone, Paul Dax)
Of all the Andrássy châteaux, the most important one is at Betliar (Betlér) and, because of its original furnishings, is considered quite unique in Slovakia, as well as in the entire Central European region. The château’s most important feature is its library, which holds approx. 12,000 books, amongst them valuable incunabula. This library has not been fully catalogued as of yet; for this reason, cataloguing and researching it would be an important addition to reading culture and library science in the Monarchy. The Gyula Andrássy Foundation has a good working relationship with the château museum at Betliar (Betlér) and this relationship was further cemented during this visit.
Norman Stone and Mark Odescalchi in front of the Betliar château
Gyula Andrássy Senior’s neogothic style mausoleum can be found at Trebišov (Tőketerebes). The former prime minister considered this château as one of his favorites. The château was recently refurbished and a new exhibit is in the process of being organized. At Humenné (Homonna), the Andrássy château is basically a fortified renaissance style building which was redesigned in the 18th century; the inner halls are decorated with rich murals. During the 19th century the building was modernized: an imposing staircase and a two-storied library date from this period. Several portraits of the Andrássy family, among them Gyula Andrássy’s and his wife, Katinka Kendeffy’s, portraits by the French painter Édouard Dubufe are kept here.
Mr Speaker, Mr Mayor, Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen –
I am honoured to thank the Government on behalf of the direct descendants
of Andrássy Gyula for returning a fine replica of the original statue to its
original site.
The original statue disappeared after the War as Comrade Rákosi had it
melted down with other statues to provide the bronze for the massive statue of
Comrade Stalin
In a way the same thing happened to Andrassy Gyula’s descendants.
The youngest granddaughter of Andrássy, my grandmother Countess Klára
Andrássy, Princess Károly Odescalchi disappeared from Budapest in 1941. She
helped Polish servicemen and refugees escape the Nazis and was warned by
British Ambassador Owen O’Malley that she was on the Gestapo hit list and
should leave Hungary. The British helped her escape as far as Dubrovnik where
she was fatally wounded in an Italian bombing raid in April 1941.
Her son, my father, Prince Paul Odescalchi, as a student in Budapest,
fought in the resistance against the Nazis in 1944 to ‘45. Then the
Soviets imprisoned him in the camp at Gödöllő where he nearly died. On his
release in 1946 he disappeared from Budapest and moved to England.
My cousin and great grandson of Andrássy, Marquis György Pallavicini, was
imprisoned in Dachau for anti-Nazi activities in 1944. Shortly after his
release and return to Budapest in 1945 he was imprisoned by the Soviets and
disappeared from Budapest. He died in the Lubyanka in Moscow in 1948.
As a liberal politician Andrassy would have had no sympathies for
dictatorships of either the right or the left.
His achievements and legacy in Hungary were hidden and forgotten under
the Communist dictatorship. After the failure of the 1848-49 Revolution Andrássy
spent 10 years in exile and was hung in effigy. Upon his amnesty and return in
1858 he worked with Ferenc Deák on the Compromise which was implemented in 1867
when Andrássy was appointed Prime Minister. Deák described Andrássy as being
providential – sent by God for the task. The resulting stable relationship between
Austria and Hungary was further enhanced by Andássy with the series of
alliances he forged as First Hungarian Foreign Minister of the Dual Monarchy. A
role in which his international outlook and experience and diplomatic skills
could be used to the full. A leading
role played by Andrássy at the Congress of Berlin of 1878 is celebrated in the
bronze relief you see today. The almost half a century of peace that followed
resulted in an unparalleled period of prosperity with people from all over the
Empire being attracted to a Budapest which was expanding rapidly. The layout of
Pest as you see it today was designed then following the vision of Andrássy of
a metropolitan city.
We are reminded of the legacy of Andrássy as one of Hungary’s great
statesmen by the return of his statue. This will be further assisted by the
first biography to be written on Andrássy in over a century. Norman Stone (who
is here today), a prize-winning former professor of history at Oxford
University and adviser to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, is writing a
biography of Andrássy due to be published in Hungarian and English next year,
the 150th anniversary of the Compromise. This work, is supported by
the Andrássy Gyula Alapítvány.
The family are proud to see Andrássy back on his horse in front of
Parliament once more and grateful to the Government for making this possible.
As part of the ongoing renovation of
Kossuth Square, replicas of the monuments and statues which were in
place in the square prior to World War 2 will be returned to the
positions of the original statues. A replica of the equestrian statue of
Count Gyula Andrassy will be therefore be returned to its original
position south of the Parliament during 2014.
The original statue was commissioned by public order in 1890 upon the death of Andrassy. This memorial was awarded by competition which was won by sculptor Gyorgy Zala. Two photos displayed here illustrate the original work.
Looking over the Danube towards the Royal Palace, 1908
View of the statue from the southern end of the Parliament building, 1937
The statue in bronze, stood on a plinth 7
meters high with a bronze relief of the Coronation of 1867, the
culmination of the Compromise with Austria crafted by Deak and Andrassy,
on one side of the plinth. On the other side of the plinth was a bronze
relief of the Congress of Berlin of 1878 initiated by Andrassy at which
the balance of power in Europe was negotiated by the great powers.
Replicas of the original reliefs have been commissioned. The equestrian
statue which stood on the plinth was 6 meters high and was of rare
quality. It dominated the south side of the square and could be easily
identified from the Buda side of the Danube.
The original statue was melted down in 1948 under the orders of
Communist Party Secretary Comrade Matyas Rakosi to provide part of the
bronze required for the construction of the massive statue of Comrade
Stalin which in turn was destroyed during the Uprising against the
Soviet Union in 1956.
Prince Paul Odescalchi was an Hungarian noble who resisted the Nazis in Budapest but was branded a class enemy by the communists.
Prince Paul Odescalchi
Prince Paul Odescalchi, who has died
aged 90, was one of the last surviving links with “old Hungary” – that was dominated
by a handful of great families, the Eszterházy, Andrássy, Apponyi, Széchenyi
and Odescalchi dynasties among them.
The power of this aristocracy, based
on the ownership of vast estates, was broken by Austria-Hungary’s defeat in the
First World War and the resulting Treaty of Trianon, which deprived Hungary of
two-thirds of her territory, including many noble estates which became part of
the successor states — Czechoslovakia, Romania and Yugoslavia.
Paul Otto Charles Odescalchi was
born in Budapest on September 28 1923. His family were comparative latecomers
to the ranks of the Hungarian aristocracy – although the Odescalchis had been
prominent in the nobility of northern Italy since the 11th century. Benedetto
Odescalchi, as Pope Innocent XI from 1676, inspired the formation of the Holy
League (consisting of Austria, Poland and Venice) which relieved the siege of
Vienna by the Turks in 1683 and expelled them from Buda three years later.
In recognition of Benedetto’s role,
Leopold I, as Holy Roman Emperor, honoured the Odescalchi family by making the
Pope’s brother, Livio, a Prince of the Empire and Duke of Szeremség, a title
which carried with it huge estates in northern Croatia, then part of Hungary.
His descendant and namesake, Prince Livio Odescalchi, who was Empress Maria
Theresa’s Marshal of Court, took over these estates in the late 18th century
and married a Hungarian heiress, thus founding the Hungarian branch of the
Odescalchi family which held a distinguished place in Hungarian society until
1948.
Paul Odescalchi’s mother, Princess Klara (Kaja) Odescalchi, was the youngest granddaughter of Count Gyula Andrássy, a celebrated Foreign Minister of the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary from 1871 to 1879 and chief architect of the 1879 Dual Alliance with Germany – a defensive alliance against Russia.
Paul Odescalchi’s parents’ wedding in 1921
Paul Odescalchi’s parents’ wedding in 1921
More importantly, perhaps, Paul Odescalchi was also
the last surviving link with the small but heroic anti-Nazi resistance movement
in Hungary during the Second World War. When the Trianon Treaty swept away the
family estates, Paul’s father, Károly (“Carlo”) Odescalchi took up a career in
business, becoming in 1935 a member of the board of Ganz, Hungary’s largest
industrial enterprise.
In 1940, in return for Adolf Hitler’s assistance in
recovering a large slice of Slovakian territory, Hungary joined Germany, Italy
and Japan in the Tripartite Pact and was thereby committed to the Axis cause.
The board and management of Ganz was, with the sole
exception of Carlo Odescalchi, entirely Jewish and consequently vulnerable.
When, in 1941, Hungary entered the Second World War by sending 40,000 troops to
join German forces in the invasion of the Soviet Union, the Ministry of War
planted agents in all defence-related enterprises, including Ganz, to weed out
“unreliable elements” and assign them to duties at, or just behind, the front
line, in which their life expectancies would be short.
When the agent assigned to Ganz demanded the removal
of a Jewish engineer, a decorated veteran of the First World War who had been
overheard making anti-German remarks, Carlo Odescalchi protested strongly and
announced that he was himself no friend of Germany. Although threatened with
arrest, he mobilised personal contacts to secure the intervention of the
Hungarian “Regent” Mikos Horthy, who ordered the transfer of the Ministry’s
agent to another enterprise.
After the German occupation of Hungary in March 1944, Carlo found that his name was at the top of a Nazi blacklist; he consequently kept a low profile, working from home and moving frequently, until the war was over.
He and Princess Klara had divorced before the war. But
she too had become involved in helping enemies of Nazism. In particular she
aided refugees who had fled to Hungary after Hitler’s invasion of Poland in
1939 but before Hungary entered the war on the side of Germany. Polish soldiers
who wished to continue the fight were allowed to make their way to western
Europe; by 1941, nearly 50,000 had done so. Poles who elected to remain in
Hungary were well cared for and Princess Klara served as Vice-President of the
Hungarian-Polish Committee for Refugee Care. She gave the Committee office
space in her home and supplied the British Ambassador of the time, Owen
O’Malley, with valuable political intelligence.
When, in 1941, Hungary’s entry into the war caused the
rupture of British-Hungarian relations and a surge of Nazi influence in Budapest,
O’Malley warned Princess Klara that she was in imminent danger of arrest. Armed
with an exit permit signed personally by Horthy, she was driven by the British
Naval Attaché to Dubrovnik.
The plan was that the Royal Navy would arrange her
onward journey to Greece by submarine and thence to Cairo. She never made it,
being killed in Dubrovnik by an Italian bombing raid on the port – the only
such raid of the war.
At the time of his mother’s death Paul was 17 years
old and a pupil at the Ferenc Jozsef Catholic gymnasium in Budapest. From there
he enrolled in the city’s Jozsef Nádor Technical University to study
Engineering Science. After the German invasion, however, he became increasingly
impatient to do something, as he put it “to stop us from being Hitler’s last
collaborators”.
His search for kindred spirits brought him into
contact with two young Hungarian Army officers, Jeno de Thassy and Guido
Görgey, who had evaded service at the front and were involved in sporadic acts
of resistance.
Despite their youthful enthusiasm, the anti-fascist
resistance movement in occupied Hungary was too small and too divided to make
much of a dent in Nazi and Arrow Cross (Hungarian fascist) power. Two of the
movement’s most effective leaders, the radical democrat Endre Bajcsy-Zsilinszky
and the Communist László Rajk, attempted to unite its various factions under a
“Committee of Liberation”; but the Committee was betrayed almost as soon as it
had been formed and its members – with the exception of Rajk – were hunted down
and shot or hanged.
Odescalchi, as well as carrying out useful work as a
courier between resistance groups and in arranging the transfer of Jews and
other potential victims of the Gestapo from one safe house to another, was involved
in several ill-conceived schemes that were doomed to failure.
He did, however, play a leading role in one successful
resistance operation. Having gravitated to a resistance group led by a Staff
Captain László Sólyom, he set off, disguised as a workman and carrying
explosives in a toolbox. Having made his way to the Gellért Hill, he
successfully destroyed four German military trucks in their parking place.
When the siege and bombardment of Budapest began in
December 1944, Odescalchi, with de Thassy and Görgey, joined many other members
of the capital’s former haut monde in taking refuge in the cellars of the
Wagons Lits building on Vörösmarty Square. He remained there, chafing at the
enforced inactivity, until, in mid-January 1945, Russian troops burst in and
ordered the inhabitants to clear the rubble and debris from the square outside
while they, the “liberators”, looted the building.
Word reached Odescalchi and his two colleagues that
they should meet László Sólyom who, at the Budapest Committee of the Hungarian
Communist Party (HCP), introduced them to János Kádár, who was to be installed
as leader of communist Hungary in the wake of the 1956 uprising. Kádár offered
his aristocratic guests the opportunity to join the HCP, with the distinction
of low membership numbers, in recognition of their resistance activities.
Odescalchi rejected the offer outright; de Thassy and
Görgey temporised. Sólyom then offered them the opportunity of serving under
him in the newly-formed police force; Odescalchi again declined, “gently but
firmly” as de Thassy later recalled, although his comrades accepted the offer.
On leaving the building, however, all three were arrested by Soviet soldiers
and incarcerated in a nearby cellar. De Thassy and Görgey eventually succeeded in
escaping from the cellar, leaving Odescalchi to his fate.
This turned out to be imprisonment, as a “class
enemy”, in a Soviet concentration camp near Gödöllö, outside Budapest. Typhus
was endemic in the camp and the majority of its inmates died as a result.
Odescalchi contracted the disease but survived; he was released in 1946, though
he was so physically diminished that his father failed to recognise him.
In 1947 Odescalchi succeeded in securing an exit
permit and fled to England, where he read Engineering at Liverpool University
and, in 1948, married Zsuzsanna Tamassy, who had followed him from Budapest. He
transferred from Liverpool to Bristol University in order to read Psychology
and Philosophy.
After graduating, he pursued a career in industrial
psychology, working, first, for IBM, for whom he ran a training centre in the
Netherlands, and then in Cheltenham, as a consultant. He had in the meantime
divorced Zsuzsanna and in 1963 remarried, to Antonina Horne.
In retirement Odescalchi actively supported several
charities related to Hungary and Transylvania, work which continued after his
second divorce in 1995, and his move to Arles, in southern France, where he
lived in partnership with Anne-Charlotte DuChastel.
He was a regular visitor to Budapest and to the
village of Tiszadob, where the Andrássy family had owned an estate. As deputy
president of Transylvania Direct, he helped to provide transport for
Magyar-speaking children in Transylvania so that they could be bussed to
Magyar-speaking schools. In 2005 he founded the Gyula Andrassy Foundation to
promote the legacy of his great-grandfather.
Paul Odescalchi is survived by a son from his first
marriage and by a daughter from his second.
Prince Paul
Odescalchi, born September 28 1923, died April 17 2014
