Budapest in 100 years and 2,000 postcards

Located in Gozsdu Udvar's Antik Galéria és Bolhapiac courtyard, the exhibition titled "Budapest in 100 years and 2,000 postcards" recently opened to display a wide variety of cards featuring black-and-white and color photography, along with written memories about impressions of the city dating all the way back to the 1800s.

Just a few years ago, we all had to send postcards to our family members and friends if we went to summer camp or took a seaside holiday – if we did not, they were offended for life (or at least for a few weeks), since this was an important gesture even 20 years ago. (True, by the time the postcard reached its recipient, the sender was usually back home – but the thought is what counted.) Today, the instant-image messages of
Facebook and smartphones took over, and we rarely buy and send postcards anymore. But if we do, it is often as much for their artistic value as it is for scribbling brief travelogues.

The cards exhibited in Gozsdu Udvar carry lots of information about their historical backgrounds, supplemented by the messages and notes written on them. There were times when the whole reverse side of the cards was meant for addresses, with no place for a quick note. Naturally, people found ways around this, which resulted in many cards having scribbles even on the borders of the picture itself. Some premium hotels issued their own postcards in order to spread the word about the institutions. Most hotel postcards at the exhibition are about the Gellért Hotel, and if we look a bit closer, we can see that there are a few cards where the sender marked the room in which they resided.

It would take several hours to read and study all the photographs of the city's past in this exhibit. Reading these messages from 100 years ago provides an interesting experience: the language and the calligraphic writing present a unique atmosphere. Several of them are hard to decipher, but it can be a good game to guess who must have written them."Kukac, be well, or I won't bring … Tata" "There aren't any more cards in Kolozsvár, and here we can't get any either. In these days … and I'm going to please you with kisses. Sincerely, Laci"

We can find some more extreme cards in a backlit frame: holographic cards with 3D effects, and even luminous ones. Unfortunately there were no chiming postcards, but we can see some rather creative pieces made by photographers and graphic artists of the previous century.