Urbs - Magyar várostörténeti évkönyv 4. (Budapest, 2009)
Recenziók
Abstracts 451 primarily the construction of Uránváros which made Pécs into a modern socialist city. The buildings “grouped” in this western district (including the first eight-storey blocks in the country, a department store, the “Magasház” tower block and the first system-built blocks) stood in symbolic counterpoint to the “old” Pécs and effectively redrew the town’s image. Accompanying Pécs’ “urbanisation”-the architectural term for modernisation at the time - was a highly contradictory process of “learning to live” for the city’s inhabitants. The natives of Pécs regarded the almost futuristically modern new district as completely alien, and its inhabitants - for a long time - as outsiders. One source of tension was that the people living in what was billed as Hungary’s most modern housing estate were in fact drawn from the least urban section of the population. Those awarded housing there naturally also regarded themselves as privileged persons. The first residents, the uranium mining families, also had very high incomes. The native tiikes found many causes to regard the Uránváros inhabitants with envy and contempt. Restlessness in the modern environment and rivalry among different districts led to serious conflicts, and the discussion of these in various forums (council meetings, local newspaper) was an important means of educating or “urbanising” the newly-settled inhabitants of Uránváros. The study sets out to analyse the process of “learning to live” among the residents of Pécs Uránváros, through the contemporary discourse and interviews with the first residents. This throws light on connections among contemporary social expectations of the time, ideals of behaviour and the modern urban environment. BOLDIZSÁR VÖRÖS The Real Street of an Imaginary Captain The honouring of Captain Gusev and his comrades with a commemorative plaque and the name of a street in central Budapest, 1949-1990. At the end of the Second World War, the Hungarian writer Béla Illés (1895-1974), a major in the Soviet army, invented the completely fictional case of Russian Captain Aleksei Gusev and his comrades. In Illés’ story, some soldiers serving with the Tsar’s army sent to put down the Hungarian War of Independence of 1849 plotted to assist the Hungarian struggle, but were discovered and tried, and some of them, including Gusev himself, were executed in summer 1849. In the second half of the 1940s, Illés and his associates propagated and promoted this story in Hungary as a true historic event. Through various machinations by the authors and the pursuit of legitimisation by the
