Day 46 – May 31 Tuesday

Slept in until 5.50am this morning – the rising sun shines straight in.  Got ourselves organised & piled into the Zastava (car) by 9am for the 54km drive from Kikinda to the small village of Magyar Ittabe (Novi Itabej in Serbian) (try & find that on a map) to stay in Katalin’s family home for a few days.  This is the village where Tereza’s family on her mother’s side come from & Tereza was born on the family farm (her mother’s parents) around 7km out of the village.  We drove through a lot of flat farmland with lots of corn & wheat growing & passed through a few small villages.  We also passed a lot of farm tractors on the road, most of them returning from a farmers protest rally in Belgrade – a long way on a tractor.

The village of Magyar Ittabe consist of around 95% Hungarians – in Serbia this is a high concentration of Hungarians, one of the results of political splitting of countries after wars.  About 300 metres away is the start of the town boundary of Serbski Ittabej, composed around 95% Serbs, some Romanians & some Gypsys.  It is very close to the Romanian border, you can see the Romanian villages in the distance.  The house is a good size, brick with a terracotta tile roof & walls around half a metre thick.  It’s fully furnished with all the things her parents left, has a short drop toilet, a corn drying shed on top of three pig sties, a chook shed & yard, a goat shed, a huge vegie garden & the rest of the small farm planted with fruit trees & corn.

We spent the morning looking around & checking things, it’s a few weeks since they were last here, then picked a few strawberries, it was too hot to get serious.  After lunch we had a nice long chat, looked through old photos of Katalin’s parents & grandparents (Tereza’s grandparents as well).  Things had cooled down so we picked the rest of the strawberries & I washed Antal’s car while he was watering the garden.

Late afternoon a long slow walk around the village, Tereza talked to a few cousins & some locals that were out on the street.  They were curious who these new people were, I think within about an hour of us arriving, everyone in the village knew we were here.  We walked past where Tereza’s grandparents house used to be, the person that owned it bulldozed it down & laid concrete for a grain drying factory he was setting up.  He mustn’t have got approval for it, in between the houses, so all there is of it is the concrete driveway & pad – a waste of a nice house.  Some of the old Hungarian houses are completely tiles outside (must be the rich ones).  All the exterior of the house is covered in glazed tiles – I guess you never have to paint, it always looks shiny & new.  There are a few beautiful big houses that many Australians would be envious of – they have mainly been built by people who work/worked in Germany or other wealthier countries. We passed a few other houses that at one time were owned by Tereza’s relatives, substantial buildings, as pre communism the families were well off, owning factories & manufacturing businesses as well as good farms.  The houses are now in a sad state of repair, the one in the prime position in the village, a huge corner block, is falling down, roof collapsing, ceilings collapsing, windows broken, brick walls falling apart.  This one Katalin has a small share in, the other part owners, cousins in Canada, won’t do anything about it, don’t even want to sell it, so it is falling apart & one day I think the local mayor will send them a bill for cleaning it up.

We sat outside late talking, it doesn’t get dark until around 10pm here, before a late dinner & bed.