Dear Janos,
Birthdays are a good time to reflect upon the paths one was intended to follow, upon detours, and upon the routes left unexplored. I am sure that your years in Canada would at least sometimes feel like an exile… proving it’s impossible and perhaps unimportant to always stay “on track.” And maybe it’s precisely such exilic experiences that make homecomings so special and inspire one to do his best whenever he can.
I’ll leave it to your colleagues to praise your contribution to strengthening the field of Medieval Studies in Central and Eastern Europe and will instead tell you that what you have done for generations of students who became medievalists and also for those who, like me, later pursued a different field of studies must bring you a sensation of joy and accomplishment, of feeling yourself in the right place at the right time. I am deeply grateful to you for providing me with a wonderful example of scholarly rigor and commitment to creating an excellent academic program. Your straightforwardness set the tone to our seminars that were so engaging that after a year at CEU I could never write a paper without feeling responsibility for each sentence and for each detail I mention.
And while being always honest with me about my work, you have always been so generous on a personal level. In spring, when our M.A. class was about to leave for Croatia and Slovenia, I was thinking of staying in Budapest to work on my thesis. And you just put things in perspective for me: “It’s good to see a bit of the world. You should go on this trip.” And you were right! It was all great: marveling at old cities together with such wonderful ‘characters’ as Zurabi Aloiane who said he would be perfectly happy living in Bale and even composed a Bale ode to a somewhat dried bun saved “for after breakfast” and also as Adrian Bara who couldn’t stand the sight of a woman carrying a heavy bag across yet another pile of 15th-century rubble; seeing about a dozen medieval cemeteries a day tucked away in the hills of Istria (an exhausted fellow student whose accolade to you is also on this web site even wished some of those had been bombed out during WWII so that we wouldn’t have to study hundreds of tomb stones;-)); and taking snapshot of our two Levans who by the end of the day were gazing at a donkey with much bigger interest than at yet one more fresco…
And just to let you know how popular you were with our class, here’s another episode from spring 1997. In the Fine Arts Museum in Wien, when an art historian from our class had pointed out that a certain blue sculpture from Egypt strangely reminded one of Janos Bak, a group of us flocked away from the medieval paintings on the main floor and into the basement to check it out . Happy Birthday to you, Janos, and many happy returns of the day!
Love,
Lena Baraban (+ Masha Barabanchik)
