Szatmári Gizella: Signs of Remembrance - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2005)
of the government-built workers' and clerks' colony to be named Weker'ie for the Prime Minister who had initiated the project. His main aspiration was to employ a distinctly Hungarian style here, and these intentions are clearly illustrated by the spatial organisation and facades of the residential buildings and public institutions of the colony, or garden city, here. It was his guiding principle in his later work, too, that "our folk art is grounded in the Middle Ages and our national art is grounded in our folk art". In 1923, he published a linotype-illustrated book on the Hungarian, Romanian and Saxon heritage of art in Transylvania. Founded in 1924, The Arts and Crafts Guild of Transylvania published his writings entitled The Crow Dynasty, 1925; The Builder oft a Country, 1934 and Antal Budai Nagy, 1936. He mostly illustrated books and made architectural designs. Between 1931 and 1944 he was editor-in-chief of the magazine Tran&ylvania Helicon and chaired the painters’ guild named after Miklós Barabás. The guild's Palace of Arts was raised on his designs in 1923. His activities as a party politician attending to ethnic-minority affairs lasted for a few years only; his real greatness resides in the efforts made to uncover, preserve and disseminate the cultural heritage of his community. "1 saw the Saxon architecture of the Küküllő Hill-Country, and I saw that of the Toroczkó, the Székely and the Kalotaszeg Hungarians,” he remembered in his journal. "They are all different, as the Saxon, the Székely and the Kalotaszeg peoples also differ from one another, but then they have much to share, also, as they live in the same country and in the same climate, they have the same past, and their joys and sorrows have been the same-, they share the same memories and the same history... It is the laws of this community that we will have to learn from them if we are to use a Hungarian idiom in our work". His plaque, made by sculptor Gyöngyi Szathmáry in 1983, is in the eponymous square in the Wekerle Colony (3 Kós Károly tér, District XIX). The "Shout that Dies Down in the Distance" The officialdom of the arts was very slow in recognizing the greatness of József Egry. Although he was the first, in 1948, to be awarded the newly- founded Kossuth Prize and his pictures were taken to the Venice Biennial, all five of his pictures presented at the first all-Hungarian fine arts exhibition in 77