Vadas József (szerk.): Ars Decorativa 13. (Budapest, 1993)
FERENCZY Mária: Stein Aurél és Hopp Ferenc
world several times 12 , started to collect objets d'art, and supported cultural and scholarly activities on a regular basis. He also played no insignificant part in the spread of photography in Hungary. The message contained in the letter has also a pertinent symbolic aspect: Hopp's reliable instruments had augmented the equipment of the young scholar, and the photos which could serve as preliminary studies for the photographic documentation of the major expeditions of later times were taken by Stein with a camera bought from Calderoni and Co., i. e. from Budapest and from Ferenc Hopp. The other instrument mentioned in the letter, the aneroid barometer, was no new invention at this time, but was still considered up-to-date (its quality matched international standards, according to the contemporary trade catalogue of the firm). Besides making meteorological observations, it could also help to determine height above sea level; it was an indispensable aid to travellers in remote places. The Jaina shrine mentioned in the postscript could have been bought by Hopp in 1882/83 during his first visit to India, on his first journey around the world. Having brought it home, he had it erected in the garden of his villa (it stands there even today, at Andrássy út 103, in Budapest). The photographs mentioned in the letter are not known to have survived; there are other photos in the Hopp bequest from around the same time as the garden and the placing of the shrine in it. One is included among the illustrations as No. 4. 13 It is not known whether Ferenc Hopp complied with Stein's request that he send him a similar garden photograph showing the Jaina shrine. According to our present knowledge, their correspondence contains one additional item: New Year's greetings in Hungarian from Merton College, Oxford, probably sent several decades later. 14 That they maintained a correspondence subsequently can be inferred from another reference in a letter written by Hopp and dated London, August 16, 1905. In this the receipt of letters forwarded to him by his business manager from Budapest is acknowledged, with a letter from Aurel Stein among them. 15 The documents kept in the documentation department of the Ferenc Hopp Museum show, albeit fragmentarily, but nevertheless unequivocally, that these two Hungarian citizens from Budapest, each with his very different inducements and courses in life but each very particular in his own field, followed each other's careers with attention and appreciated each other's activity; this contributed to the strengthening of the ties that bound them to Hungary. This is worth remembering now, 160 years after Ferenc Hopp's birth and fifty years after Sir Aurel Stein's death. Notes 1 With a single exception, these were written by Stein between 1920 and 1939 to Zoltán Felvinczi Takács, then director of the Hopp Feren Museum. Written in faultless and elegant Hungarian, they contain moral support from an older friend for the younger colleague, encouraging him in his researches into the history of oriental arts and encouraging him to fulfil his mission to keep up and develop the museum, even under the difficult conditions then pertaining in Hungary. Excerpts from these letters are published by Pál Miklós in the autumn number of the journal Keletkutatás [Oriental Studies] 1993. 2 Reference: A 1671/9/1-4. For a partial photo cf. III. No. 2.; the photo originally enclosed in the letter is on III. No.3. — Jammu was the winter residence of the Maharaja of Kashmir. The royal library was housed in the Raghunath temple. The catalogue listing of its Sanskrit MSS was published by Stein in 1894. (Catalogue of the Sanskrit
