It is not often that Hungarians manage to get into the news though they have been improving lately. Their antics in the European Parliament and at home recently have resulted in a lot of raised eyebrows and few friends. Now the parliament in Budapest as well as the city fathers have embarked with unusual zeal on a campaign to rename squares and streets with even Elvis Presley likely to get a small park named after him. What exactly is driving this zeal is not really clear but one thing is sure: it has now reached Budapest’s airport which has been called Ferihegy since it opened in the early 50’s.
From now on Ferihegy is (or should be) called Liszt Ferenc International Airport. Do you know who Liszt Ferenc was? I have asked a few people among my contacts and none of them have ever heard of him. If they had to guess, they said he was probably some kind of Hungarian aviation pioneer…
In fact Liszt Ferenc was a 19th century Hungarian composer and piano virtuoso who, by the way, did not speak a word of Hungarian. This did not prevent him from becoming the most technically advanced pianist of his time. He is certainly a more prominent figure in Hungarian history than Mayerffy Ferenc who was the owner of vineyards in the area where the airport now stands.
It is an understatement to say that the name change was not received with cheers in the country. Most people were simply asking the question: why? What the hell was wrong with Ferihegy?
Of course it is not unusual to name airports after musicians (see Warsaw and Chopin) or politicians (see Paris Charles De Gaul or Washington and Ronald Reagan). It is also true that Liszt does deserve to have something named after him.
But why an existing airport that had a name that was well known world-wide? In any case, airports that got new names in mid-life all continued, and continue to be, called by their original names. CDG used to be called Roissy and to this day the OFFICIAL Paris Airports company web site refers to CDG as Roissy. The name change for Washington National has produced an even stranger animal. It is now called Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. A few more name changes and the name will not fit into a single text message.
When in communist times the Gerbeaud coffee house was renamed Vorosmarty everybody just kept calling it Gerbeaud… until some 40 years later it got its name back.
I am pretty sure that the same will happen with Ferihegy. It may now be called Liszt Ferenc Airport but people even 20 years from now will still go to Ferihegy Airport.
This is why the name change was well intentioned but totally misguided. Liszt Ferenc deserves something more permanent.
One reason that pbn’s friends might not have recognised ‘Liszt Ferenc’ is that he is generally known, in the West at least as ‘Franz Liszt’, the greatest piano virtuoso of the 19th Century. So not only has the airport been renamed, but so in a sense has Liszt himself, double confusion. I don’t understand the logic for either.