Laying the foundations for a "resort for the mind"

Ferenc Nádasdy returned to Hungary following the dramatic political and economic changes of over a decade ago. Courtesy photo.

Ferenc Nádasdy: Re-building a dream

By Ferenc Nádasdy

The story, in his own words, of one of Hungary’s last surviving members of the Nádasdy family, among Hungary’s oldest noble families. This is the story of a Count who was ousted from his family home before he fled to Canada. It was only several decades later that Nádasdy returned to recover the stately mansion in which he grew up. The former-artistocrat went on to develop a foundation devoted to fostering the arts and preserving the global environment.

(Budapest) The world changed drastically in my early childhood, at a time of terrible turmoil and disorder in Europe. Like many others born into a historic family in Hungary ours too ended up dispersed, uprooted and robbed of our worldly possessions with the arrival of the communist era.

The traces of history can leave cruel marks, with the last century being no exception.

I was born in 1937, and until the age of seven I lived in the Nádasdy Mansion, a stately home not far from Budapest built by my ancestors in the 19th century. The Nádasdy family traces its roots in Hungary for over 800 years, and the historic heritage that was left to me included a host of colorful characters, national heroes, and even some less glorious but still important figures. Whatever their background, these people today color history books: they were dreamers and builders.

Like many Hungarians of my age, in the fall of 1944 I lost my father to the ravages of the Second World War. In early 1945 my mother, two sisters and I escaped Hungary for the first time when the communist forces initiated their battle against the aristocracy.

When we returned life was obviously not the same as in the pre-war period. I no longer had a father, and all of the worldly goods of a very old family were no longer ours: these had been nationalized, stolen or otherwise dispersed.

Seeing how a home can easily be taken away was an early lesson that has remained with me throughout my life as a kind of a backdrop. As a result, I never ended up being of the mind to purchase real-estate since it is just not as tangible as people think.

When we returned to the village of Nádasladany in early 1946, there was no question of our returning to the mansion. We were generously put up by a villager until sometime in 1948, when we were forced to flee the very village that bore our name. Our family left for Budapest, and then in were even forced out of the capital. This period marked the very last time that our family was together.

My sisters quietly went to live in little villages. I went to Kecskemet with my mother and finished my high school diploma, before I was designated to work the night shift in a factory as a laborer.

I couldn’t go near a university since our name was categorically black-listed and we were de facto forbidden from taking part in society in many ways.

With the failure of the revolution in 1956 in late November, I suddenly didn’t see much of a future for myself in Hungary. I didn’t hesitate to leave.

I set out for a journey to the border that would take me a couple of weeks, and would eventually lead to Canada. I can clearly remember my arrival in Halifax on the 5th of January 1957. I’ll never forget that day because it was minus 15 degrees, and I thought I’d turn around and go home right away, it was so cold! However, Canada became my welcoming home for the next forty years.

I only ended up getting my Canadian citizenship after my studies in the United States, which I was able to do with a scholarship. Then I began a phase of photography and various other artistic endeavors. The early years in Canada were for me a time of being broke and on my own, searching for a new place and a new meaning.

Maybe it is because my family was dispersed when I was so young that I basically spent much of my life living alone. When I think of it, I’ve been pretty much on my own since I was nineteen years old. There were various exceptions to the rule, there being three marriages! But somehow I have lived the life of a lone wolf for many years.

When I reached my thirtieth birthday I suddenly realized that I had used about half of my life, and that thought ended up inspiring me to devote time to accomplish a mission that ended up being re-born decades later in the form of the Nádasdy Foundation for the Arts and Environment.

As it happened, the moment of realization was during the beginning of the first wave of environmental and ecological movements around the world, in the late 1960′s and early 1970′s, after the release of the first Club of Rome report. The report really shook up the Western world, which had been oblivious to the problems, and began a realization that there was another dimension to life on earth. That was the environment.

The world is still talking about this today, with the recent world summit in Johannesburg again showing that the world is still fragmented about these vital and basic issues. This, however, makes my resolve even stronger.

At that time I decided to take a sabbatical from my working life in Canada, and I traveled to Crete where I spent about two years working on a book that would never get published. This time was, however, a determining factor for my personal mission, and that of the dream of the foundation and academy.

I had a lot of concepts that were developed in the manuscript that I called ‘The Revolution of Survival’, and most of the principles that I talked about then are the very same that I still follow to this day.

Over the subsequent decades I did have a real job. In Canada, I worked in the business of importing wines for the international firm Remy Martin and other spirit companies. I traveled to and from the wine regions of California, South Africa, the Bourgogne and Champagne in France, the Rhine in Germany, and parts of Chile. I tasted a lot of good wine at that time, and got a picture of the different cultures of the world through the cultivation of grapes and production of good wines!

The idea of creating a foundation where the arts and environment met, however, never left me.

It was in the early 1990′s when I started to return to Hungary more frequently, and began working with succeeding governments in Hungary to have the use of the family mansion to fulfill the concepts behind the foundation.

The idea behind the Nádasdy Foundation for Arts and Environment was to establish an international, non-profit organization that would establish the Nádasdy Academy for Arts and Environment.

The mission was to demonstrate that art and our diverse cultures are an essential part of our environment and that the environment is an integral part of culture. The two are therefore irrevocably linked through their vital and constant interaction and should always be considered, nurtured and brought back into balance as one.

The concept was to support the development of the arts and enhance cultural life as part of our total environment. The mansion was to be the venue where we would attempt to find responsible solutions to attain sustainable development in order to prevent the further destruction of our global ecology.

A new term or concept that has been promoted by the Nádasdy Foundation is « sustainable environment and individual responsibility », which is the only way in which the global ecology and life on the planet will be maintained.

As we have now recognized, today the world faces unprecedented challenges, and solutions are not only desirable but absolutely necessary.

The Nádasdy Academy, which will only be able to be completed with further financing and the complete restoration of the stately home, is intended to nourish growth in the creative capacity of artists as well as business and civic leaders. The academy will provide a rare setting for creativity and a unique environment in which decision-makers can re-charge their intellectual batteries and renew attitudes. In short, a resort for the mind.

A Hungarian and Canadian citizen, Ferenc Nádasdy is the president of the Nádasdy Foundation for the Arts and Environment, and is one of the last surviving members of the historic Nádasdy family.