The following is an adapted version of an article originally published in Hungarian in Magyar Krónika.
This is what the news reports were about in the snowy days of December 1925, exactly 100 years ago.
The December issue of the National Film Institute’s (NFI) series entitled 100 Years Ago Today — Newsreels of Old Times has been published, presenting the most important events captured on film in the last month of 1925: the record amount of snow that fell on Budapest; one of Lajos Kossuth’s last soldiers, who was still alive at the time; the regiment ceremony of the hussars in Székesfehérvár; and the flood disaster in Békés County, which ruined Christmas for hundreds and thousands of people a hundred years ago.
Snowfall
‘The heavy snowfall at the end of November was followed by another at the beginning of December, which covered the capital with an unusually thick blanket of snow, up to a metre deep in some places. The cold weather persisted into the first weekend of the month, and as the snowfall was followed by a sharp drop in temperature, tens of thousands of people once again flocked to the Buda hills. Most of them threw themselves into the joys of winter sports with great enthusiasm, skiing on mostly untracked roads, paying no attention to the traffic. By midday, the excitement had reached its peak, and minor and major accidents occurred one after another. Several people crashed into rocks and roadside trees, requiring the ambulance service to respond to numerous calls and transport the unlucky victims to the hospital. Finally, the police were called to Svábhegy, but they too proved powerless in the face of the cheerful and carefree crowd,’ the video says.
Ice Rink
As far as winter sports are concerned, it is revealed that ‘the Budapest Skating Association (BKE) proposed the construction of an artificial ice rink as early as the beginning of the 1900s, but this did not happen due to World War I. However, the 1925 season also marked the end of the ice on the lake in City Park, as major renovations were planned for the BKE ice rink from the following spring, with a 15-billion-korona investment to build an artificial ice rink cooled by refrigeration equipment.’
1848 Veteran
The newsreels also reported on one of the last soldiers of Lajos Kossuth, who was still alive in 1925. As we can learn from the video: ‘A resident of the Honvéd Menház on Soroksári Road, he enlisted in the army of the War of Independence as a teenager, where he was seriously wounded in a battle with the Russians. The 94-year-old veteran was one of the last surviving soldiers of the 1848 Revolution in 1925. He lived in the Honvéd Menház for three years, but by then his fellow residents were already sick soldiers from World War I who had been left without support or shelter, and whom the state was trying to help in this way.’
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