The Phoenix Land (57 page)

Vilmos Röder
(1881–1969): A colonel at the time of King Karl’s second
putsch
, Röder went on to head the department of strategic planning and was later Chief of General Staff from 1930 to 1935 and minister of defence from 1936 to 1938. He was one of Bethlen’s most trusted supporters and at the end of the Second World War, at the Crown Council in 1944, it was he who advised on the ceasefire arrangements.

Johannes Schober
(1874–1924): Chief of police in Vienna from 1918, chancellor from 1921 to 1922 and from 1929 to 1930, foreign
minister
from 1930 to 1932.

Count Antal Sigray
(1879–1947): Much in evidence in 1922 when King Karl made his second attempt to return to Hungary and regain his throne (see Chapter Six of Bánffy’s
Twenty Five Years [1945]
in this volume). He was a lifelong supporter of the Legitimist cause. In 1943 he openly advocated the withdrawal of Hungary from its alliance with the Axis and in revenge, was arrested by the Germans and sent to the concentration camp at Mauthausen. After his release, he left the country and died in New York in 1947.

Sándor Simonyi-Semadám
(1864–1946): Briefly prime minister in 1920. Retired from politics in 1922.

Colonel Tihamér Siménfalvy
: A member of several extreme
right-wing
organizations. Admiral Horthy had great confidence in him.

Slovensko
: Province of Hungary awarded to the new State of Czechoslovakia the Treaty of Trianon.

Field Marshal Jan Smuts
(1870–1950): South African soldier and liberal politician, Prime Minister of South Africa from 1919 to 1924 and again during the Second World War. Close friend of Winston Churchill.

Károly Soós
(1869–1953): Served in Austro-Hungarian army,
promoted
to general and field marshal. Served as Chief of General Staff and minister of defence in 1920. Commanded army of the south.

Spandau
: Berlin’s military headquarters and principal barracks
situated
about ten kilometres northwest of the city centre.

Aurél Stromfeld
(1878–1927): prominent left-wing politician with a distinguished army background.

István Szabó of Nagyatád
(1863–1924): Founder of the National Independent and Holders Party in 1909, which led to the formation
of the National Smallholder’s Party in 1919. After the fall of Communism, he became finance minister and later minister of
agriculture
. He was largely responsible for the 1920 law that distributed land to the peasantry.

The Szeklers
: A race of disputed origin but with largely Magyar traditions and language who had settled in Transylvania some time in the Dark Ages, and who formed an important section of the (then) Hungarian community in the population of that province. They were fiercely anti-Romanian, claiming to have come there centuries before immigration was to bring many Romanian peasant families seeking refuge from the Turkish domination of what was in 1866 to form the independent principality (and from 1881, kingdom) of Romania with an appointed German sovereign, Prince Charles of
Hohenzollen-Sigmaringen
. The Romanians claim descent from the Dacians of Roman times, and the whole question of the origins of the several ethnic groups in Transylvania has for many years been the subject of bitter dispute between scholars of Magyar and Romanian origins.

Szovata
: Located in Transylvania, 152 kilometres south of Kolozsvár – now Cluj – with hot and cold salt lakes.

Count Pál Teleki
(1879–1941): Born of an ancient Transylvanian family, geographer and scientist, president of the Society of Turan, 1913, foreign minister and minister for agriculture in Count Gyula Károlyi’s government founded in Szeged to combat Communist rule in Budapest. In 1920 he again became foreign minister and then, in 1921, prime minister. He worked hard for the revision of the Treaty of Trianon, opposed the growing influence of the Soviet Union and was one of the first Hungarian politicians to recognize the threat posed by the Nazis. Appointed once more to the office of prime
minister
in 1939, he killed himself when Hitler tried to make Hungary enter the war on the German side.

Kálman Thaly
(1839–1909): Poet and historian. He wrote about the
‘kuruc’
spirit and helped create the national veneration for Rákóczi’s part in the 1848 freedom fight. He founded the Hungarian Historical Society and the magazine
Centuries
.

Imré Thököly
: one of Transylvania’s greatest and most successful
military
leaders. Earned the admiration of France and other opponents of the Habsburgs and played a decisive part in attaining a measure of independence for Hungary in the late seventeenth century.

Viorel Tilea
: Romanian diplomat. His posthumous memoirs,
Envoy Extraordinary
(Hagerstown Press), were edited by his daughter Ileana Tilea in 1998. His unpublished correspondence – some of it with Bánffy – shows that the two men had become friends.

István Tisza
(1861–1918): Several times prime minister of Hungary. Although opposed to the war, he kept this office at the request of Emperor Franz Joseph and was assassinated in 1918. Bánffy gives a
sympathetic portrait of this most honest and upright of Hungarian politicians in his trilogy,
The Writing on the Wall
.

Nicolae Titulescu
: Romanian ambassador in London in 1922 and foreign minister from 1927 to 1936. His compatriot, the diplomat Viorel Tilea, refers to Titulescu in his posthumous memoirs,
Envoy Extraordinary
(London, 1998) as ‘a wise and highly respected
statesman
who had avoided being embroiled in local politics yet was often a foreign minister in reserve’. In 1934 he was responsible for
establishing
diplomatic relations between Romania and the USSR.

Tokaj
: Located at the centre of the district producing Hungary’s most famous wine of the same name. Pope Pius IV expressed his
appreciation
of it at the Council of Trent (1545–1563) at which the Roman Catholic Church planned the Counter Reformation. King Louis XIV of France is recorded as saying: ‘Tokaj is the wine of kings and the king of wines.’

Alexandru Vajda-Vojvod
(1872–1950): One of the leading figures of the Romanian National Front in 1918, prime minister from 1919 to 1920 and from 1932 to 1933. He was a Transylvanian landowner of ethnic Romanian origins with property not far from the Bánffy castle of Bonczhida.

Colonel Vix
: Commander of the French Military Mission, which then occupied Hungary, and was all-powerful. He was a real thorn in the flesh to Mihály Károlyi, who was later to write of him that he turned down all Károlyi’s requests but not those from ‘Germanophile’ members of the
‘ancien régime’
who ‘busied themselves with drawing up unfavourable reports on the new Hungary, reports which Colonel Vix … was only too pleased to forward to Versailles’.

Warnemünde
: A small port on the Baltic just north of Rostock.

Kaiser Wilhelm II
(1851–1941): Grandson of Queen Victoria and Emperor of Germany from 1888 until the end of World War I, when he abdicated and went to live in retirement at Doorn in Holland. Known to all Englishmen as ‘The Kaiser’ and much hated as being responsible for the war.

Queen Wilhelmina
: Queen of Holland from 1890 to 1948 when she abdicated in favour of her daughter Princess Juliana.

Thomas Woodrow Wilson
(1856–1924): From 1913 to 1921 he was president of the United States, and entered the war on the Allied side in 1917. He was present at the peace talks in Paris which led to the Treaty of Trianon in 1920, but his Fourteen Points, which were just and moderate, failed to be incorporated into the final draft of the treaty, due largely to the Allies’ desire for vengeance against Germany and Austria-Hungary.

Empress Zita
(1892–1989): Princess of Bourbon-Parma. Married to Archduke Karl in 1911. He died in exile in 1922, while she went on to survive him by over fifty years.

First published in the United Kingdom in 2003
by Arcadia Books, 15-16 Nassau Street, London, W1W 7AB

This ebook edition first published in 2011

All rights reserved
© Miklós Bánffy 1932, 1945 and 2003
Translation from the Hungarian © Patrick Thursfield and Katalin Bánffy-Jelen

The right of Miklós Bánffy to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly

ISBN 978-1-908129-67-3