Ferkai András: Housing Estates - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2005)

The worker's colony of the Hungarian Railways

■ The water tower behind a courtyard block on the Mdvag Housing Estate

Vienna, or the collective houses of Soviet Russia were built in the 1920s. It is a sad irony of history that the rich communal activities of the Mávag-colony lost their vitality after the firm was nationalised. Services were gradually terminated, the buildings fell into disrepair, and the baths in the basement were flooded with water. While the makeup of the estate's population remained largely unchanged with the flats tenanted mainly by the company's employees and their descendants, the community building did less and less to cater for these tenants. It was caught up with the fate of community centres at large. At first it continued to offer cultural programmes and welcome specialised club meetings, but then it was obliged by financial reasons to let its facilities to whoever paid for them. It saw one last period of cultural vitality in the 1980s when the establishment calling itself "The Black Hole’’ opened in its basement. With its punk-rock bands and various fringe programmes the club served as a major centre of a peculiar subculture for a while. The institution did not outlive the change of political regime by very much. When the factory was privatised, it was detached from the housing estate to be sold separately to an American religious community, which now uses it as its school and community rooms. The estate recently appeared in a Hungarian film called "Cha-cha-cha” used as the backdrop meant to evoke, with a blend of irony and reminiscence, the memory of the 1960s.

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