Endralon

[novarei]

The Open Question

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A Season under the Holy Crown

By: Suyin Chow from Hugamest, the Besplatno Valley, and Zergon — April 5738

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My plane landed in Hugamest a little after dawn, and the first thing I must report is the airport, because the airport is a thesis. It was built, rebuilt, Béla would later correct me, everything here has been rebuilt, in the style of the High Kingdom: vast eclectic halls of honey-coloured stone and cast iron, domes ribbed in green copper, arcaded galleries stacked one atop another like the tiers of a wedding cake, every façade carved, every spandrel gilded, the whole thing less a terminal than a basilica. The walls of the arrivals hall had murals two storeys high, the Conquest Tribe fording a river under a bronze sky; the coronation of Saint Ottokar with the Holy Crown; a scene I could not identify of a bishop blessing soldiers before a burning city, which I would learn soon enough. The floors shone, the brass freshly polished.
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And here is what I did not see, though I had been told to expect it: the Leader. No portrait forty feet high, no slogans, no cult of personality. I have arrived in a dozen countries called authoritarian and been greeted by these outward symbols of authority.  In Hugamest the only faces are dead kings and saints.
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My driver was waiting past customs with a hand-lettered sign and a stomach that preceded him by a comfortable margin. Béla is Zergonese, from the provinces, his luthorina is spoken in a thick accent.
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"You see the airport?" he said, before I had fastened my seatbelt. "Sixty years ago, a shed! A shed, Miss Chow. Rain came in. Now look. In Kundrati they have airports like bus stations and bus stations like ruins." He chuckles to himself.  "Here even our ruins are repaired." He pulled into traffic. "I will show you the city. You will not believe."

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The City
He was right, and I did not believe.
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I had read the some histories before coming. Hugamest at the founding of the crowned republic was by every account a dilapidated place, a capital of crumbling "directorial" brutalist monstrosities and decaying rotting factories. The old grand avenues where pot holed, large swaths of the city were dominated by uniform, utilitarian blocks. What has happened since was perhaps a greater physical revolution than the directorate political one. A total renovation, two decades of demolition and construction on a scale that flattened whole quarters and raised them again to a single coherent plan. Great boulevards have been driven through the brutalist tangle, lined with façades of that same honey stone, often six storeys, mansard roofs, wrought-iron balconies, ground floors of arcaded shops, anchored on something: a domed church, a colonnade, an equestrian saint. New old styles, different districts under reformed styles of varios anciant and long gone monarchies. The neo baroque of the Fifth Kingdom of Endralon of the late 4600s. Romanesque of the 21st and 22nd centuries. And a unique Art Nouveau of the current long time President of the Federal Council  Mátyás Várkonyi.
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Béla narrated all of the renovations. "This boulevard, ten years old. Looks like two hundred, yes? That is the skill. New pipes, new wires, new metro underneath, new old eh!" He took both hands off the wheel to gesture at a façade. "The Old Man [Mátyás Várkonyi] said a people who live in ugliness learn to behave with ugliness. So. No more ugliness."
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Whatever else this regime has done, it has presided over a boom: new industry in the ring towns, new rail in every direction. The cafés are full. The shop windows are full. The trams are full, new and run to the minute. 

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The Dancer
One cannot go to Hugamest without seeing the ballet, it was there I met Marek, a principal of the National Ballet, Zergonese by birth, twenty-six years old. We met in a rehearsal hall of the National Theatre of Mihály III, where he had just spent three hours on a revival of a folk dances, the sort of material that thirty years ago, he told me, would have been museum work.
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"Now we turn people away," he said. "Even the standing places sell out." He said.
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Marek finished practice, and invited me to church. The churches of Hugamest are full. Not attended, full, at weekday masses, full of young men and women. Not a single grey hair to be seen.
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I asked Marek about this revival, his answer was to unbutton his collar and show me the medal he wears against his skin: a severe profiled head, mitred, encircled with lettering I could not read. "Saint Péter," he said, and when I looked blank, with gentle patience he said: "Erdő. The Archbishop. You do not know him?"
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I know him now. Péter Erdő: a priest of a millennium ago, a field chaplain through eight years of the Second Civil War, wounded at the front. He would late become Primate of all Endralon in the "catastrophe" of 4733; who buried his king and his friend, fed the defeated, ruled the broken country for a term and then, and this is the part every Endralonian tells you with the same reverence, walked away. Refused re-election. Retired to a monastery to mourn and to study, and died there. In the intervening centuries Endralon become one of the most secular states in the world. Nearly four centuries of political seesawing between monarchies and directorial republics led to a great exhaustion with history. Seventy years ago it all seemed settled, a secular, very nearly atheistic directorial republic become triumphant. Yet somehow, perhaps the malaise, the grey buildings, the long slow economic stagnation, but in the last fifty years, the young in Endralon have become the vangaurd of a reborn faith.  
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"He is why I believe," Marek said simply. "Not arguments. Him. A man like that existed, in the worst time we ever had. So the thing he believed cannot be nothing." He rebuttoned his collar. "The new Archbishop is the same kind. You should hear him. E"
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The new Archbishop, Primate of all Endralon, a man of perhaps sixty, a canon lawyer, another son of a small town, is by broad agreement the second-most important man in the country, and the only one whose portrait you do see, in shop windows and parlours, beside the Saint's. He preaches to a full cathedral but much like the Old Man is otherwise enigmatic. 
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"You are looking for the trick," Marek said to me as I left  kindly, because everyone here says it kindly. "There is no trick. We were a people who believed in nothing, and we were miserable. Now we believe."

-The view from the  National Theatre of Mihály III

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The Countryside
Béla drove me south out of the capital on a grey Thursday, and within an hour the reborn city of Hugamest faded. The old republican and directorate styles returned. Concrete and blocks.
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The renovations of the capital do not reach the Besplatno Valley. The new trains pass through it without stopping much. The villages here are poor,  and unlike the city, old. And the politics are poor too, as Béla told me. "This is republican country." The valley voted against the crowned republic in the referendum of 5670. The old parties of the old regimes survive here as the folk-religion survives elsewhere: in the family, at the kitchen table, in the way a man will call the Protector "the president" with a flat deliberate wrongness, like spitting.
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I stayed two nights with a farmer, Tódor, in a stone house his family has held, he said, "since the second republic, or the third. One of the good ones." He is seventy and he laid out his politics unasked.
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"They will tell you in Hugamest that everyone believes now," he said. "Here is what I believe. I believe my grandfather voted in real elections, where you did not know who would win. I believe a republic means the big man goes leaves office sometimes. Didnt their "saint" do that. This one has not gone home in twenty-seven years." He refilled my glass. "And I will tell you what makes me spit. It is not that he robs us though all those pervert priests I bet are. It is that he has made everyone grateful. A whole country, grateful, like a dogs. My grandfather was a citizen. That was how he introduced himself, as citizen! I am a well-fed dog."
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I asked him whether he went to church.
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"For weddings. Funerals. And I guess when my sister insists. I am not one of those brain washed kid marching off to church." He points at a bunch of young people, dressed in old folk dress, going into the chapel accross the street.
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"Look at them," he said. "They think this is rebellion. We were rebels, actual fighting fascism, we lost sure. What is their rebellion?Fasting and babies. Every generation I guess must invent a way to annoy the old."

Part 1.