They Were Counted

by Miklos Banffy

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

Shooting parties in great country houses, turbulent scenes in parliament and the luxury life in Budapest provide the backdrop for this gripping, prescient novel, forming a chilling indictment of upper-class frivolity and political folly in which good manners cloak indifference and brutality. Abady becomes aware of the plight of a group of Romanian mountain peasants and champions their cause, while Gyeroffy dissipates his resources at the gaming tables, mirroring the decline of the Austro-Hungarian empire itself.

Release date: July 9, 2009

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 508

Sample

WINNER OF THE WEIDENFELD TRANSLATION PRIZE

Praise for Miklós Bánffy

‘Bánffy is a born storyteller’ Patrick Leigh Fermor, from the Foreword

‘A Tolstoyan portrait of the end days of the Austro-Hungarian empire, this compulsively readable novel follows the divergent fortunes of two cousins, the politician Abady and gambler/drunkard Gyeroffy, detailing the intrigues at the decadent Budapest court, the doomed love affairs, opulent balls, duels and general head-in-the sand idiocies of a privileged elite whose world is on the verge of disappearing for ever. Bánffy – Hungarian count – also writes with extraordinary vividness of the natural beauty of his Transylvanian homeland. Two more novels – They Were Found Wanting and They Were Divided – followed, usually published as The Transylvanian Trilogy’ Adam Newey, ‘1000 Novels You Must Read’, Guardian

‘Just about as good as any fiction I have ever read, like Anna Karenina and War and Peace rolled into one. Love, sex, town, country, money, power, beauty, and the pathos of a society which cannot prevent its own destruction – all are here’ Charles Moore, Daily Telegraph

‘Fascinating. He writes about his quirky border lairds and squires and the high misty forest ridges and valleys of Transylvania with something of the ache that Czeslaw Milosz brings to the contemplation of this lost Eden’ W. L. Webb, Guardian

‘Pleasure of a different scale and kind. It is a sort of Galworthian panorama of life in the dying years of the Habsburg empire – perfect late night reading for nostalgic romantics like me’ Jan Morris, Observer Books of the Year

‘Totally absorbing’ Martha Kearney, Harper's Bazaar

‘Charts this glittering spiral of decline with the frustrated regret of a politician who had tried to alert Hungary's ruling classes to the pressing need for change and accommodation. Patrician, romantic and in the context of the times a radical, Bánffy combined his politics – he negotiated Hungary's admission to the League of Nations – with running the state theatres and promoting the work of his contemporary, the composer Béla Bartók’ Guardian Editorial

‘Like Joseph Roth and Robert Musil, Miklós Bánffy is one of those novelists Austria-Hungary specialised in. Intimate and sparkling chroniclers of a wider ruin, ironic and elegiac, they understood that in the 1900s the fate of classes and nations was beginning to turn almost on a change in the weather. None of them, oddly, was given his due till long after his death, probably because in 1918 very much was lost in central Europe – an empire overnight for one thing – and the aftermath was like a great ship sinking, a massive downdraught that took a generation of ideas and continuity with it. Bánffy, a prime witness of his times, shows in these memoirs exactly what an extraordinary period it must have been to live through’ Julian Evans, Daily Telegraph

‘Full of arresting descriptions, beautiful evocations of scenery and wise political and moral insights’ Francis King, Spectator

‘Plunge instead into the cleansing waters of a rediscovered masterpiece, because The Writing on the Wall is certainly a masterpiece, in any language’ Michael Henderson, Daily Telegraph

‘So enjoyable, so irresistible, it is the author's keen political intelligence and refusal to indulge in self-deception which give it an unusual distinction. It's a novel that, read at the gallop for sheer enjoyment, is likely to carry you along. But many will want to return to it for a second, slower reading, to savour its subtleties and relish the author's intelligence’ Allan Massie, Scotsman

‘So evocative’ Simon Jenkins, Guardian

‘Bánffy's loving portrayal of a way of life that was already much diminished by the time he was writing, and set to vanish before he died, is too clear-eyed to be simply nostalgic, yet the ache of loss is certainly here. Laszlo has been brought up a homeless orphan, Balint's father died when he was young and the whole country is suffering from loss of pride. Although comparisons with Lampedusa's novel The Leopard are inevitable, Bánffy's work is perhaps nearer in feel to that of Joseph Roth, in The Radetzky March. They were, after all, mourning the fall of the same empire’ Ruth Pavey, New Statesman

Cast of Characters

(In order of appearance in the three volumes of The Transylvanian Trilogy)

COUNT BALINT ABADY

Main character of trilogy. Son of Countess Roza Abady and the late Count Denes Abady. Heir to castle and estate of Denestornya. Member of Parliament. Nickname ‘AB’.

COUNT LASZLO GYEROFFY

Orphan. Cousin of Balint Abady. Brought up by his Kollonich grandfather and aunt. Nickname ‘Laci’.

COUNTESS ADRIENNE UZDY

Oldest daughter of Count Akos Miloth. Married to Count Pal Uzdy. Mother of daughter Clemmie. Nickname ‘Addy’.

COUNT PAL UZDY

Husband of Adrienne, owner of castle of Almasko, and also a house in Koloszvar. Father dead, son of Countess Clémence Uzdy.

COUNTESS CLÉMENCE UZDY

Lives with her son Pal at Almasko. Mother-in-law of Adrienne Uzdy.

COUNTESS JUDITH MILOTH

Second daughter of Count Akos Miloth.

COUNTESS MARGIT MILOTH

Third daughter of Count Akos Miloth.

COUNT ZOLTAN MILOTH

Only son of Count Akos Miloth.

COUNT AKOS MILOTH

Father of Adrienne, Judith, Margit and Zoltan. Nickname ‘Rattle’.

COUNTESS MILOTH

Wife of Akos Miloth. Sister of Countess Ida Laczok.

COUNTESS ROZA ABADY

Mother of Balint, widow of Count Tamas Abady, her first cousin. Owner of Denestornya castle and estate.

COUNT JENO LACZOK

Owner of Var-Siklod castle. Father of Anna, Ida and Liszka Laczok.

COUNTESS IDA LACZOK

Wife of Jeno Laczok, sister of Countess Miloth.

COUNTESS ANNA LACZOK

COUNTESS IDA LACZOK

COUNTESS LISZKA LACZOK

Daughters of Count Jeno Laczok

COUNTESS LIZINKA SARMASAGHY

Known to everyone as ‘Aunt Lizinka’. Malicious gossip. Cousin of Balint's grandfather.

COUNTESS ADELMA GYALAKUTHY

Widow. Mother of Dodo Gyalakuthy.

COUNTESS DODO GYALAKUTHY

Daughter of above. Very rich heiress.

COUNTESS DINORA ABONYI

Formerly Malhuysen. Former girlfriend of Balint Abady. Married to Count Abonyi.

COUNT ADAM ALVINCZY

Father of four sons.

COUNT FARKAS ALVINCZY

Oldest son of Adam Alvinczy

ADAM, ZOLTAN, AKOS ALVINCZY

Tree younger sons of Adam Alvinczy.

COUNT ISTVAN KENDY

Cousin of the Abadys. Nickname ‘Pityu’.

COUNT SANDOR KENDY

Cousin of the Abadys. Nickname ‘Crookface’.

COUNT AMBRUS KENDY

Distant cousin of Crookface. Known as Uncle Ambrus.

COUNT JOSKA KENDY

Another cousin. In love with Adrienne Uzdy

COUNT DANIEL KENDY

Old, poor and drunkard. Cousin of Crookface and Ambrus Kendy.

COUNT EGON WICKWITZ

Austrian Army lieutenant. Nickname ‘Nitwit’.

MIHALY GAL

Old actor, friend of Balint Abady's grandfather Count Peter Abady.

ANDRAS JOPAL

Nephew of Mihaly Gal, inventor, tutor to Laczok boys at Vat-Siklod castle

PRINCE LOUIS KOLLONICH

Owner of Simonvasar castle. Co-guardian of Laszlo Gyeroffy. Father of Klara, Niki and Peter.

PRINCESS AGNES KOLLONICH

Born Gyeroffy. Aunt of Laszlo Gyeroffy and his guardian. Second wife of Prince Louis Kollonich. Stepmother of Klara. Mother of Niki and Peter.

DUCHESS KLARA KOLLONICH

Daughter of Prince Louis Kollonich. In love with Laszlo Gyeroffy, who is also in love with her.

DUKE NIKI KOLLONICH

Brother of Klara Kollonich.

DUKE PETER KOLLONICH

Brother of Klara Kollonich.

COUNT ANTAL SZENT-GYORGYI

Owner of Jablanka castle. Married to Princess Kollonich's sister.

COUNTESS ELISE SZENT-GYORGYI

Married to Antal Szent-Gyorgyi, sister of Princess Agnes Kollonich, born Gyeroffy.

COUNTESS MAGDA SZENT-GYORGYI

Daughter of Antal and Elise Szent-Gyorgyi.

COUNT STEFI SZENT-GYORGYI

Brother of Magda.

COUNTESS FANNY BEREDY

Wife of Count Beredy. A beautiful singer.

COUNT JAN SLAWATA

Councillor to the Foreign Office.

COUNT FREDI WUELFFENSTEIN

Foolish Anglophile.

ISTI KAMUTHY

Young M.P. Foolish Anglophile who speaks with a lisp.

PRINCE MONTORIO-VISCONTI

Suitor to Klara Kollonich.

KRISTOF AZBEJ

Unscrupulous lawyer to Countess Roza Abady. Manages Laszlo Gyeroffy's estate.

MRS TOTHY AND MRS BACZO

Housekeepers to Countess Roza Abady.

ANDRAS ZUTOR

Balint Abady's forest ranger. Nickname ‘Honey’.

KALMAN NYIRESY

Balint Abady's forest supervisor.

GEZA WINCKLER

Balint Abady's head forester.

GASZTON SIMO

Dishonest notary in Balint Abady's constituency.

DR AUREL TIMISAN

Romanian lawyer.

DANIEL KOVACS

Notary in Lelbanya – Balint Abady's constituency.

COUNT IMRE WARDAY

Guest at Fanny Beredy's dinners.

MADAME SARA BOGDAN LAZAR

Farmer. Befriends Laszlo Gyeroffy.

COUNT TAMAS LACZOK

Brother of Count Jeno Laczok. Railway engineer.

BARON GAZSI KADACSAY

Unconventional soldier. Owner of fine horses.

NESZTI SZENT-GYORGYI

Rich cousin of Antal Szent-Gyorgyi.

ZSIGMOND BOROS

Transylvanian lawyer. M.P. A shady rogue.

MAIER

Butler to Uzdy family. Formerly worked in lunatic asylum.

COUNT TISZA

Minister-President of Budapest parliament. Admired by Balint Abady.

PALI LUBIANSZKY

Politician. Opposed to Tisza.

TIVADAR MIHALYI

Leader of opposition in Budapest parliament.

FERENC KOSSUTH

Important politician.

MINISTER-PRESIDENT JUSTH

Important politician.

ANDRASSY

Important politician.

GEZA FEJERVARY

Politician, elected Prime Minister.

JANKO CSERESZNYES

Unscrupulous demagogue, ally of lawyer Azbej.

KRISTOFFY

Minister of Interior in ‘Bodyguard’ government.

SAMUEL BARRA

Politician: opposed to Ferenc Kossuth.

MIKLOS ABSOLON

Political leader of Upper Maros region. Uncle of Pali Uzdy. Brother of Countess Clémence Uzdy. Traveller.

COUNTESS LILI ILLESVARY

Daughter of Countess Illesvary, niece of Countess Elise Szent-Gyorgyi.

CONTESSA JULIE LADOSSA

Laszlo Gyeroffy's mother.

REGINA BISCHITZ

Daughter of shopkeeper. Sympathetic to Laszlo Gyeroffy.

MARTON BALOGH

Former butler and servant to Laszlo Gyeroffy.

Foreword

by PATRICK LEIGH FERMOR

I first drifted into the geographical background of this remarkable book in the spring and summer of 1934, when I was nineteen, halfway through an enormous trudge from Holland to Turkey. Like many travellers, I fell in love with Budapest and the Hungarians, and by the time I got to the old principality of Transylvania, mostly on a borrowed horse, I was even deeper in.

With one interregnum, Hungary and Transylvania, which is three times the size of Wales, had been ruled by the Magyars for a thousand years. After the Great War, in which Hungary was a loser, the peace treaty took Transylvania away from the Hungarian crown and allotted it to the Romanians, who formed most of the population. The whole question was one of hot controversy, which I have tried to sort out and explain in a book called Between the Woods and the Water* largely to get things clear in my own mind; and, thank heavens, there is no need to go over it again in a short foreword like this. The old Hungarian landowners felt stranded and ill-used by history; nobody likes having a new nationality forced on them, still less, losing estates by expropriation. This, of course, is what happened to the descendants of the old feudal landowners of Transylvania.

By a fluke, and through friends I had made in Budapest and on the Great Hungarian Plain, I found myself wandering from castle to castle in what had been left of these age-old fiefs.

Hardly a trace of this distress was detectable to a stranger. In my case, the chief thing to survive is the memory of unlimited kindness. Though enormously reduced, remnants of these old estates did still exist, and, at moments it almost seemed as though nothing had changed. Charm and douceur de vivre was still afloat among the faded decor and the still undiminished libraries, and, out of doors, everything conspired to delight. Islanded in the rustic Romanian multitude, different in race and religious practice – the Hungarians were Catholics or Calvinists, the Romanians Orthodox or Uniat – and, with the phantoms of their lost ascendency still about them, the prevailing atmosphere conjured up the tumbling demesnes of the Anglo-Irish in Waterford or Galway with all their sadness and their magic. Homesick for the past, seeing nothing but their own congeners on the neighbouring estates and the few peasants who worked there, they lived in a backward-looking, a genealogical, almost a Confucian dream, and many sentences ended in a sigh.

It was in the heart of Transylvania – in the old princely capital then called Kolozsvar (now Cluj-Napoca) that I first came across the name of Bánffy. It was impossible not to. Their palace was the most splendid in the city, just as Bonczhida was the pride of the country and both of them triumphs of the baroque style. Ever since the arrival of the Magyars ten centuries ago, the family had been foremost among the magnates who conducted Hungarian and Transylvanian affairs, and their portraits, with their slung dolmans, brocade tunics, jewelled scimitars and fur kalpaks with plumes like escapes of steam – hung on many walls.

For five years of the 1890s, before any of the disasters had smitten, a cousin of Count Miklós Bánffy had led the government of the Austro-Hungarian empire. The period immediately after, from 1905, is the book's setting. The grand world he describes was Edwardian Mitteleuropa. The men, however myopic, threw away their spectacles and fixed in monocles. They were the fashionable swells of Spy and late Du Maurier cartoons, and their wives and favourites must have sat for Boldini and Helleu. Life in the capital was a sequence of parties, balls and race meetings, and, in the country, of grandes battues where the guns were all Purdeys. Gossip, cigar smoke and Anglophilia floated in the air: there were cliques where Monet, d’Annunzio and Rilke were appraised; hundreds of acres of forest were nightly lost at chemin de fer; at daybreak lovers stole away from tousled four-posters through secret doors, and duels were fought, as they still were when I was there. The part played by politics suggests Trollope or Disraeli. The plains beyond flicker with mirages and wild horses, ragged processions of storks migrate across the sky; and even if the woods are full of bears, wolves, caverns, waterfalls, buffalos and wild lilac – the country scenes in Transylvania, oddly enough, remind me of Hardy.

Bánffy is a born storyteller. There are plots, intrigues, a murder, political imbroglios and passionate love affairs, and though this particular counterpoint of town and country may sound like the stock-in-trade of melodrama, with a fleeting dash of Anthony Hope; it is nothing of the kind. But it is, beyond question, dramatic. Patrick Thursfield and Kathy Bánffy-Jelen have dealt brilliantly with the enormous text; and the author's life and thoughtful cast of mind emerges with growing clarity. The prejudices and the follies of his characters are arranged in proper perspective and only half-censoriously, for humour and a sense of the absurd, come to the rescue. His patriotic feelings are totally free of chauvinism, just as his instinctive promptings of tribal responsibility have not a trace of vanity. They urge him towards what he thought was right, and always with effect. (He was Minister of Foreign Affairs at a critical period in the 1920s.) If a hint of melancholy touches the pages here and there, perhaps this was inevitable in a time full of omens, recounted by such a deeply civilized man.

Chatsworth, Boxing Day, 1998

* John Murray, 1980.

Introduction

Miklós Bánffy and the Transylvanian Trilogy

by PATRICK THURSFIELD

My acquaintance with the works of Miklós Bánffy started one day some years ago when I was motoring from my home in Tangier to Rabat. My fellow passenger was a Hungarian friend, Kathy Jelen, who had lived for many years in Tangier and who was going to Rabat to sign some papers that confirmed her ownership of the copyright to her father's works. All I had known about Kathy's father, Count Miklós Bánffy, was that he had been a wealthy Hungarian magnate and politician: but I had not known before that he had for many years been a Member of Parliament; nor that he had been Foreign Minister in 1921–22; nor anything about his writings or of his directorship of the state theatres in Budapest; nor of his practical support for writers and artists, and indeed all ethnic Hungarians, in the new Romanian Transylvania of the 1920s and ‘30s; nor anything of his role as a great landowner with a castle near Kolozsvar (once also called Klausenburg and now given the Romanian name of Cluj-Napoca) whose fortune derived from thousands of acres of forest in the mountains of Transylvania. During our leisurely four hour's car ride we talked of little else and when Kathy told me of his great trilogy, Erdélyi Történet – in English A Transylvanian Tale – which had been a bestseller in Hungary in the 1930s but which had never been translated or published elsewhere as the last volume had not appeared until 1940 when all Europe was in the throes of war, I longed to know more. First of all she told me about the first book of the trilogy, Megszámláltattál – They Were Counted, which had just been re-issued on its own in Budapest and had been an immediate sell-out; and it had been because of this that Miklós Bánffy's daughter had thought it wise to confirm her ownership of the copyright and so henceforth be entitled to receive some benefit, however modest, from her father's works which was all that remained of her lost inheritance. At that time, of course, no cracks were yet to be seen in the Communist stranglehold over eastern Europe, so there was still no suggestion that dispossessed exiles would ever regain any of their lost possessions.

Kathy then revealed that several years before she had begun an English translation, but that it had not prospered and she had never finished it. I picked up the scent at once and was soon in full pursuit. Could I read what she had written? Of course. As soon as we returned to Tangier she would bring it round to me. A few days later there arrived a tattered brown parcel containing a huge pile of faded typescript in single spacing on flimsy paper. The different chapters were held together with rusty paperclips and the appearance of it all was, to say the least, uninviting. Several pages seemed to have been mauled by cats, as I later found to have been the case. By then Kathy had told me more about her father, a polymath if ever there was one, kind, gentle, a linguist, an artist whose designs were still in use at the Budapest opera, a humanist and a great lover of his country and of women (including, it is said, Elinor Glyn who was thought to have used him as the model for one of her heroes), many of whom had fallen into his arms before he married late in life the actress who had been his great love but whom, because of the shibboleths of that class-ridden world, he had not been able to marry until after his father's death. She also told me of the great baroque castle of Bonczhida, the Bánffy home in Transylvania, which figures in the novel under the name of Denestornya, much as some years later Lampedusa's Donnafugata was to be a pen portrait of that author's family palace at Santa Margherita Belice in Sicily. Both houses are now ruins, the first through the spoliations of war and official neglect (the mansions of the former Hungarian ruling class were not held in esteem in Communist Romania) and the second destroyed by an earthquake.

I think I had been told that before she became Countess Bánffy, Kathy's mother had been an accomplished and popular actress at the State Theatre in Budapest, but I knew nothing of the story of the aristocrat's love for the actress nor of the many hurdles to be surmounted before their marriage could take place.

Dismayed though I was by the state of the manuscript I tackled it at once and was enthralled. When I started to read what Kathy had already translated, the original text and a Hungarian dictionary at my side, I soon discovered that written Hungarian is often a staccato language even when it is at its most elegiac. In consequence a literal translation in English would give none of the quality of the original and would fail completely to give any idea of the idiom and feeling of the first years of this century in central Europe. Besides this the length of the work and its Dickensian range of plot and subplot, as well as the extensive cast list, meant that anyone tackling it would have to make an English version rather than a literal translation. What a challenge!

I at once asked Kathy if she would let me see what I could do and then, if she agreed and it seemed to go well, I would show what I had done to friends in London and ask their opinion before we embarked on a voyage which would involve much time and effort for us both. Encouraged, we set to work; and now the pages of Kathy's literal translation (on which I could base an English text) arrived in exemplary legible typescript. Of course I must have been a little crazy to tackle anything of that length – particularly a translation of a dead author who, however well-known he may have been in his own country, had never been heard of in the English-speaking world. And not only that, but to tackle, even with the help of a born Hungarian, a book originally written in a language of which I did not then understand a single word (and I confess to not knowing many more now), was sheer folly. But I was caught by the sweep of the story, the range of characters, the heartbreak, the truth and the sheer humanity of it all. I knew that once started I could never stop until it was done for I desperately wanted others to enjoy it as much as I had. Furthermore I did have one unexpected advantage. As a boy I had often spent holidays with Anglo-Austrian cousins in their castle in Tyrol and so I did have some first-hand experience of central-European vie de château which in the 1930s had barely changed since the days, thirty years before, that Bánffy had described in the trilogy. A year later the first long draft of our version of They Were Counted was completed. The others followed, and six years later it was all done.

Ostensibly a love story, the two principal characters are cousins, one of whom prospers while the other declines into squalor and a lonely death: but the real theme of this extraordinary family saga is the folly and insularity of the Hungarian upper classes, who danced and quarrelled their way to self-destruction in the ten years leading up to the Great War; and the insularity of the politicians who were so preoccupied with their struggle against Habsburg domination that they saw nothing of the storm clouds gathering over Europe. Ironically enough I had just arrived at Bánffy's description of the events following the assassination of Franz-Ferdinand at Sarajevo – and the sad spectacle of the youth of Hungary marching off gaily to war while the hero of the novel reflects that nothing will come of it all but the destruction and dismembering of his beloved country – when bombs started exploding once again in that sad and much disputed city.

At this time a symposium devoted to the life and works of Miklós Bánffy was held in the great hall of the Raday Institute in Budapest. This was presided over by the then Foreign Minister, Jeszenszky Geza. The guest of honour was Miklós Bánffy's daughter Katalin (my friend Kathy), and in addition to Mr Jeszenszky's opening address there were speeches and reminiscences covering all aspects of Bánffy's distinguished career from no less than eleven speakers, seven of whom had travelled from the former Hungarian province of Transylvania (Romanian only since 1920). These proceedings, which took from 9 a.m. in the morning until 1 p.m. were followed by a buffet lunch, a visit to the Opera House where a bust of Bánffy by his friend the great Hungarian sculptor Strobl was unveiled. This had been preserved in the storerooms of the National Museum and had now been loaned to the Opera House by Bánffy's daughter. The celebrations ended with the pinning of wreaths and bunches of spring flowers to the still battle-scarred facade of the former Bánffy house in Pest. All through the proceedings strobe lights were switched on and off, television cameras whirled and repeated flash-lights showed the determination of the media photographers not to miss a second of what was going on. Afterwards Kathy, a grey-haired lady married to an American former naval officer, was interviewed for two different television cultural programmes. Now, I asked myself, why was Miklós Bánffy, a name hitherto unknown in England, so highly honoured in his native land?

Count Miklós Bánffy was, as we have seen, Hungarian by birth, but a very special sort of Hungarian in that his family sprang from Transylvania; and Transylvania, Hungary's greatest lost province, conjures up for Hungarians a totally different picture from that of the Dracula country of Bram Stoker's novel and innumerable horror films made in England and America.

After a turbulent history of domination by marauding hordes from Asia and the Turkish empire, and a period of semi-independence, Transylvania had settled down by the seventeenth century into a largely autonomous Hungarian province, a prosperous if turbulent land of mountains and forests and castles and historic towns. It was called Erdély in Hungarian, and Siebenbürgen – ‘seven cities’ – in German. Its capital, Kolozsvar, renamed Cluj-Napoca by the Romanians after Transylvania had been ceded to Romania by the Treaty of Trianon in 1920, was a university town with a diffuse culture where the dominant Hungarian landowning families all had town houses, and which was proud of its status as an alternative capital to Budapest. The people of Transylvania were partly of Romanian origin, and partly Hungarian. There were also Jewish, Szekler, gypsy and German-speaking communities – the last known as ‘Saxons’ who formed a solid largely Protestant middle-class that did not take sides either with the Hungarian aristocrats who were the landowners or with the Romanian peasantry. Some of the noble families, like the Bánffy's, were Protestant (though if a wife were Catholic, like Kathy's mother, the sons would be brought up as Protestants while the daughters followed their mother's faith), others Catholic, while the Romanian-speaking minority was Orthodox. It was from the ranks of the Bánffys, Bethlens, Telekis and other great landowners, that the princes and governors and chancellors of that once autonomous province had been chosen.

Count Miklós Bánffy was born in 1873 and lived most of his life either at the castle of Bonczhida near Kolozsvar, or in the family's town house in Pest a few minutes’ walk from the town palaces of his western Hungarian relations, the immensely wealthy Károlyi family. Mihály Károlyi, the country's first republican president after the fall of the Habsburgs, was Miklós Bánffy's second cousin, childhood playmate and once a devoted friend – a friendship which, after Károlyi's marriage and conversion to radical politics, would be destroyed by mutual distrust and hostility. Bánffy, who like many of his class was educated at the Theresianum in Vienna, later studied painting in Budapest with Bártalan Székely and then law and mathematics at the Hungarian University at Kolozsvar, first became a diplomat and then took up politics as an independent MP for his home province of Kolozs. During the First World War he was intendant of the Budapest Opera House, introducing, despite considerable opposition, the works of Bartók: and in 1916 being responsible for most of the arrangements for the last Habsburg coronation, that of the Emperor Franz-Josef's successor, his nephew King Karl. In 1921 Bánffy became Minister for Foreign Affairs, resigning a year-and-a-half later principally because of ill-health brought about by overwork and the strain of trying to represent his country at the League of Nations (where, despite serious opposition, he had obtained Hungary's admission as a full member) while being stabbed in the back by lesser men at home in Budapest. At that time he still had confidence in the regime of Admiral Horthy, who had by now made himself ‘Regent’ following the shortlived Socialist republic (of which Mihály Károlyi had been the ill-fated President) and the previous few months of the Communist rule of Béla Kun. This early confidence was to wane as Horthy soon showed signs of neo-fascist megalomania.

In 1926 Bánffy retired from public life in Budapest and went back to live at Bonczhida. From then until his death he devoted himself to literature and the arts, partly as a prolific writer whose major work was the now classic trilogy about life in Hungary from 1904 to 1914, and partly in being one of the leading spirits in founding a publishing house to encourage young Transylvanian writers in Hungarian to become better known and so retain their identity in the face of Romanian domination. Bánffy's published works also included novels, short stories, plays and two volumes of autobiography.

On returning to Transylvania he acquired dual Romanian and Hungarian citizenship and, trusted by both sides though holding no official position with either, worked hard to reconcile the mutually suspicious governments in Budapest and Bucharest. His work was made easier for him as, unlike some of the other Hungarian landowners, he spoke Romanian fluently. Despite the huge success of the trilogy and widespread public appreciation of Bánffy's cultural work in Transylvania, it is saddening to note that his political a