The chronicle of Eger Tobacco Factory

The cigarette factory

1936 was a year of quiet results. In order to try to shift the unwanted stocks of cigars, their prices were considerably reduced. The National Dairy Association set up a marquee selling milk in the factory courtyard. The number of children in the day nursery rose to forty. Ten members of the factory staff joined the Eger branch of the National Civil Marksman’s Club, under whose colours an excise clerk named Lajos Zsíros won the title of Eger city champion. Only one noteworthy event is recorded in 1937: the Central Excise Office directorate donated two air rifles to the Eger factory. But the popping of the shooting club’s rifles was soon to be lost in the thunderings of an approaching war. The first Vienna Convention’s ruling on the reannexation of the Felvidék, territory that is now Slovakia, also had its effects on the tobacco industry, which in its own way was getting its fair share of the excitements of preparing for battle. A new brand of cigarette was launched from Eger under the name “Felvidék”, sold in boxes made to hold twenty- five, but which contained only twenty-four. The cigarettes cost 1 pengő 30 fillér a box, and in place of the missing twenty-fifth cigarette was a small slip of paper announcing, in the name of the Royal Hungarian Customs and Excise Office, that the price of the lost smoke had gone towards the “Hungarians for Hungary” war fund. In 1938 the factory did not produce one single cigar, but concentrated all its efforts on its output of 95 million cigarettes, a total which represented 3.7% of national annual production.