The guest of honour was Miklós Bánffy’s daughter Katalin (my friend Kathy), and in addition to Mr Jeszenszky’s opening address there were speeches and reminiscences covering all aspects of Bánffy’s distinguished career from no less than eleven speakers, seven of whom had travelled from the former Hungarian province of Transylvania (Romanian only since 1920). These proceedings, which took from 9 a.m. in the morning until 1 p.m. were followed by a buffet lunch, a visit to the opera house where a bust of Bánffy by his friend the great Hungarian sculptor Strobl was unveiled. This had been preserved in the storerooms of the National Museum and had now been loaned to the Opera House by Bánffy’s daughter. The celebrations ended with the pinning of wreaths and bunches of spring flowers to the still battle-scarred façade of the former Bánffy house in Pest. All through the proceedings strobe lights were switched on and off, television cameras whirled and repeated flashlights showed the determination of the media photographers not to miss a second of what was going on. Afterwards Kathy, a grey-haired lady married to an American former naval officer, was interviewed for two different television cultural programmes. Now, I asked myself, why was Miklós Bánffy, a name hitherto unknown in England, so highly honoured in his native land?

Count Miklós Bánffy was, as we have seen, Hungarian by birth, but a very special sort of Hungarian in that his family sprang from Transylvania; and Transylvania, Hungary’s greatest lost province, conjures up for Hungarians a totally different picture from that of the Dracula country of Bram Stoker’s novel and innumerable horror films made in England and America.

After a turbulent history of domination by marauding hordes from Asia and the Turkish empire, and a period of semi-independence, Transylvania had settled down by the seventeenth century into a largely autonomous Hungarian province, a prosperous if turbulent land of mountains and forests and castles and historic towns. It was called Erdély in Hungarian, and Siebenbürgen – ‘seven cities’ – in German. Its capital, Kolozsvár, renamed Cluj-Napoca by the Romanians after Transylvania had been ceded to Romania by the Treaty of Trianon in 1920, was a university town with a diffuse culture where the dominant Hungarian landowning families all had town houses, and which was proud of its status as an alternative capital to Budapest. The people of Transylvania were partly of Romanian origin, and partly Hungarian. There were also Jewish, Szekler, gypsy and German-speaking communities – the last known as ‘Saxons’ who formed a solid largely Protestant middle-class that did not take sides either with the Hungarian aristocrats who were the landowners or with the Romanian peasantry. Some of the noble families, like the Bánffy’s, were Protestant (though if a wife were Catholic, like Kathy’s mother, the sons would be brought up as Protestants while the daughters followed their mother’s faith), others Catholic, while the Romanian-speaking minority was Orthodox. It was from the ranks of the Bánffy’s, Bethlens, Telekis and other great landowners, that the princes and governors and chancellors of that once autonomous province had been chosen.

Count Miklós Bánffy was born in 1873 and lived most of his life either at the castle of Bonczhida near Kolozsvár, or in the family’s town house in Pest a few minutes’ walk from the town palaces of his western Hungarian relations, the immensely wealthy Károlyi family. Mihály Károlyi, the country’s first republican president after the fall of the Habsburgs, was Miklós Bánffy’s second cousin, childhood playmate and once a devoted friend – a friendship which, after Károlyi’s marriage and conversion to radical politics, would be destroyed by mutual distrust and hostility. Bánffy, who like many of his class was educated at the Theresianum in Vienna, later studied painting in Budapest with Bartalan Szekely and then law and mathematics at the Hungarian University at Kolozsvár, first became a diplomat and then took up politics as an independent MP for his home province of Kolozs. During the First World War he was intendant of the Budapest Opera House, introducing, despite considerable opposition, the works of Bartok; and in 1916 being responsible for most of the arrangements for the last Habsburg coronation, that of the Emperor Franz-Josef’s successor, his nephew King Karl. In 1921 Bánffy became Minister for Foreign Affairs, resigning a year-and-a-half later principally because of ill-health brought about by overwork and the strain of trying to represent his country at the League of Nations (where, despite serious opposition, he had obtained Hungary’s admisssion as a full member) while being stabbed in the back by lesser men at home in Budapest. At that time he still had confidence in the régime of Admiral Horthy, who had by now made himself ‘Regent’ following the short-lived Socialist republic (of which Mihály Károlyi had been the ill-fated President) and the previous few months of the Communist rule of Béla Kun. This early confidence was to wane as Horthy soon showed signs of neo-fascist megalomania.

In 1926 Bánffy retired from public life in Budapest and went back to live at Bonczhida. From then until his death he devoted himself to literature and the arts, partly as a prolific writer whose major work was the now classic trilogy about life in Hungary from 1904 to 1914, and partly in being one of the leading spirits in founding a publishing house to encourage young Transylvanian writers in Hungarian to become better known and so retain their identity in the face of Romanian domination. Bánffy’s published works also included novels, short stories, plays and two volumes of autobiography.

On returning to Transylvania he acquired dual Romanian and Hungarian citizenship and, trusted by both sides though holding no official position with either, worked hard to reconcile the mutually suspicious governments in Budapest and Bucharest. His work was made easier for him as, unlike a some of the other Hungarian landowners, he spoke Romanian fluently. Despite the huge success of the Trilogy and widespread public appreciation of Bánffy’s cultural work in Transylvania, it is saddening to note that his political aims were not always understood by some of his fellow aristocrats who misinterpreted his efforts at rapprochement with Romania as acts of disloyalty to an afflicted and deprived Hungary. Ironically enough the (unpublished) letters of the distinguished Romanian diplomat Virgil Tilea, reveal that he too was subjected to similar criticism from his peers in Bucharest because of his friendship with Bánffy.