Remembering Life Behind the Iron Curtain, The Violent Messages

versopolis.com
21 October, 2019
The Iron Curtain, that stretched from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Adriatic in the south, effectively separated East from West for over forty years. The purported rationale for its construction was to keep all the imperialist and capitalist elements out of the communist paradise. The true purpose, obvious to everyone, was to keep the people in who would have given anything to get out.
Read More

Lost Villages

The village of Pernau, located on the other side of the border from Burgenland’s Bildein, Höll and Deutsch-Schützen, received its name from a monastery that was established there in the 12th century. The word “–apáti” – “–abbey” in Pornóapáti leaves no doubt as to the name’s origin. The Cistercian monks fled from the marauding Turks in 1530 and never returned; the buildings that housed the monks have disappeared long ago. However, a bell that used to summon the monks and the faithful to prayer now does its time-honored duty from the belfry of Pernau’s village church that was built in 1795. That bell is now Hungary’s oldest functioning bell. It was cast in 1464, twenty-eight years before Christopher Columbus arrived on the shores of America.
Read More: English | German