Saly Noémi: Café?! Változatok és változások Időszaki kiállítás 2007. február–május (Budapest, 2007)

opening new places has not decreased by a single drop of coffee. It was therefore clearly a good idea that the Hungarian Museum of Trade and Tourism current exhibition - part of a countrywide series of museum exhibitions -, should not focus on Budapest and its past as a city of cafés, but introduce a city at last filling up with various kinds of cafés once again. This intention is reflected in the material on show, which seems unusual in its composition at first sight. There is only an indication of the cafés of the past and the pictures of ihe many decades constituting the era of espresso bars only serve as a preparation to introduce the characteristic places of the new boom, each of which, besides representing themselves, represents a sub-category. In addition, it is the task of this introduction to make up for this shift, detrimental to the historic cafés of the past. I will altempt to sum up what the Budapest café was in its own classic form, how the public consumption of coffee in the city developed and how it was divided up. I will refer briefly to what constituted the powerful café tradition by which the majority of today's café owners and café goers measure themselves. But before I reach the present period, already consisting of a decade, I will cast a farewell glance at the socialist era of espresso bars, at those draughty spaces where, surrounded by the odour of coffee grinds, we sat stirring our coffee for forty years. Let us set out immediately m the footsteps of the three main tenets of this tradition. They not only became dominant m the memory of generations that, because of their late birth, did not experience everyday life in the cafés, but gradually excluded every other element. The first stubborn myth places the golden age ol Budapest café culture largely in the two decades of the 'blissful days of peace' between the wars and knows of no other age beyond this. The second talks in similar generalities of the 500 cafés of this golden age. And according to the third, cafés and literature were like Siamese twins that could not be separated. A few distoried anecdotes are added to this knowledge in the case of those who are more curious, fragments ol legends picked up from here and there but, on the whole, these three are typical. This is so despite the fact that m the last decade or so several works have appeared, some of them available today, which offer a deeper and more objective assessment of the history of the cafés. Just as the components of myth making memory are seemingly interwoven, their refutation can start anywhere and affects all of them, This is why it is worth posing the following questions simultaneously. What was the café? What are the periods it can be said to have existed? Where were they and how many were there? The legends glimpsed briefly above, after loo long a historical interval lasting several decades, have turned the word café into a nostalgic and ethereal concept, making it into a metaphor stripped, for the most part, of the very concrete historical content it once possessed. On the other hand, it must be pointed out emphatically that in terms of industrial law, the classic Budapest café of the golden age referred to above was an offspring of the 1872 trade law, remained so right up to the nationalization of 1948-1949 and thereafter was almost completely eradicated from the cityscape. According to this law, only a public space located on street level and opening onto the street, with an interior height of 4 meters and containing at least two billiard tables, could call itself a café. From the beginning, the content of the law was provided by decrees, of which the most important passed in 1900 - we will return to why precisely then - brought a further important stipulation: