Urbs - Magyar várostörténeti évkönyv 5. (Budapest, 2010)
Recenziók
Abstracts 519 GERGŐ HAVADI Szombathely’s restaurants and places of entertainment in the Kádár system The author’s work on the post-1945 history of Szombathely draws partly on traditional archive documents and press sources but is primarily based on personal reminiscences, pieced together to produce a mosaic of life in the town at a time when it was undergoing half-hearted socialist urban modernisation. These memories give a deeper view of the ordinary people of the town and how they spent their leisure. They also provide an insight into people’s individual motivations and social life and their life strategies and consumer preferences, and ultimately permit understanding the local factors defining the relationship between individual and authority. The author has made selections from the interviews, and from relevant propaganda-saturated archive and press sources, to throw light on more unusual phenomena of consumption and social life in the town, to give accounts of events which are particularly interesting or constitute local legends, and to reveal and interpret the motivations behind these events (and individuals). Social life and the scope of leisure pursuits in Szombathely during the socialist period display a certain duality. Firstly, the population was divided in this respect. The commuting inhabitants of the village-like outskirts, most of them incomers, made use of the town-centre places of entertainment only for rare official or family events, if at all. Secondly, as nightlife developed in the 1970s, it became associated with the underworld, an image the authorities tried to maintain. Criminals and a new class of entrepreneurs who frequented the night bars were the only people who could afford entertainment in these expensive places, and most people kept to very basic bars, cafés (italboltok, bisztrók, presszók) and modest restaurants, which served the quantities demanded, and changed only slowly. The key to development was the appearance of tourism.
