Szőcs Péter Levente (szerk.): Complexul Memorial Ady Endre. Ghid (Satu Mare, 2020)

Introduction - The house where the poet was born

INTRODUCTION

The house where the great poet, Endre Ady, was born became a place of memory ana a pilgrimage site since his death. The visitors coming here were looking for the milieu which determined the starting point of the career which stretched from the Ier to the Ocean: the birth-place, the landscape, the family, and its house itself, all of which marked significantly the poetic oeuvre. After a hundred years, visitors of the birth place still seeks the same answers. In the following pages, a selections of text by Endre Ady is given, which illustrate the relation of the poet with his birth place. These texts, with small additions, serve as main line of the exhibitions, therefore this booklet might serve as a guide and a piece of remembrance for the memorial complex.

THE HOUSE WHERE THE POET WAS BORN

Lőrinc Ady and Mária Pásztor got married on the 4th of June 1877. They started their life together in Mecenţiu, in the house of the womans uncle, “Gábor Kabay, a provident good farmer, who offered shelter for the young couple. Their first child was a girl, named Ilona, a sickly and weak child, who died I her first year of life. The stork delivered the second baby in the thatched house of Gábor Kabay in the third year of the marriage, on the 22nd of November 1877. This time, to the parents great joy, a boy was born, a strange child with yellowblack skin, a big mouth, without forms and with six fingers. But still, it was a boy! [...] The child seemed rather weak, therefore, taking the midwife’s advice, he was baptized the very next day, on the 23rd of November, so as not to die a pagan. Following the custom of the rural Calvinist communities, the boy was named after the first Saint celebrated in the calendar: Andrew!’Elis family and close ones called the future poet Endre. He was followed by his younger brother, Lajos, born on the 29th of January 1881. According to the memoirs of the latter “our parents house was rather small, with two rooms and a porch. The kitchen and the oven were in a different annex. Our parents postponed the construction of a new dwelling from one year to another, waiting for «better times».” (Ady Lajos: Ady Endre. Budapest: Amicus, 1923.)

The new house, a true manor house, was finally built in 1911. The old house, inherited from Gábor Kabay served as an annex of the farm, and later Lőrinc Ady s widow left it in her testament to her beloved maid Katica Kovács, married to Szabó Béla. The house was severely damaged during a fire on the 30th of October 1953. Its restoration and transformation into a memorial house was realized through the efforts of Aurel Popp, an artist of Satu Mare, an old friend of the Ady family. The house and the memorial museum were inaugurated on the 22nd of November 1953, on the 80th anniversary from the poet’s birth.

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