ABSTRACT
Middle-European middle-town. It would be irremediably average, even with its eclecticism, if it had a main square, if it still had its uniform architecture, if its firewalls didn’t stick out left and right over the neighbouring rooftops, and it weren’t irreparably wrinkled and broken. An old church with ringing bells, a theatre portico, clanking tram. The main street rises from the east, its dual curvature resembling a human spine: at its lower vertebrae, the city’s skeleton, that is, the eastern portion bends in a careful arch; at the top, however, from the Sötétkapu (Dark Gate), it turns sharply toward its head, the town hall. From the summits of the Bükk Mountains, ridges, opening like compasses, accompany the Szinva stream’s Miskolc valley to the Great Hungarian Plain. From the south, the foot of the Avas hill closes off the double folding screen of viticulture at the foot of the mountain. From the north, in turn, Tetemvár is the final element of the ridge reaching the lowlands. These noticeable slopes indicate downtown Miskolc to the traveller on the highway. Instead of the scions of bourgeois guild families, it is almost always others who inhabit it, therefore there are no tarnished signs, legendary stores, and dynasties, like those of the Austrians or the Czechs. Instead, rows of banks and telephone stores, all sorts of cheap Chinese clothing, Balkan bakeries, Arab kebabs. Nowadays, you have to explain where Miskolc’s first bookstore stood, operated by the Ferenczi family.
