Despite my lack of Hungarian, and his limited English, I managed to conduct a conversation with the head waiter in the dining room at the former Carmelite monastery in the forests of Sopronbánfalva, a district in the city of Sopron, close to the Austrian border.
I was there for five days in a refurbished monk’s cell. Nuns were there until the 1950s, the early post-war years when the country became a satellite state of the Soviet Union. The sisters commissioned some of the lavish art found in the adjacent church, where the devil is portrayed with the features of Stalin in one particular painting. The monastery later became an asylum, and eventually fell into disrepair until the refurbishment began in the early 2000s. Much of this was conveyed by the waiter, who by the third evening was responding to my questions about Hungary - its culture, its politics, its longest-serving Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán. When asked his views on the country’s relation…