August 14th, 2008

Hungarian town’s streets yet to experience system change

szaszvar.jpgThe Baranya County town of Szászvár holds the distinction of being the Hungarian locality with the most streets named after communist figures, writes stop.hu. Not in a rush to rename streets after system change in 1990, the town still features streets named after such “luminaries” as Béla Kun and József Révai, meaning that half of the town’s thirty streets hearken back to the days when you kept your mouth shut if you wanted to eat something for dinner, as opposed to the neighboring countries where dirt soup became national dishes.

The reason that the “communist town” still features communist names to this day is that it’s too poor to rename the streets, since that would mean not only putting up new signs, but would also require residents and business owners to change their papers, meaning the bill would be several million forints. That’s a lot of dollars, but not as many as a week ago.

Of course, the town could simply follow the example of Hungary in the larger sense, where foreign debt was taken on to fix cosmetic problems while overlooking the more ingrained shortcomings, and the local politicians could even skim some of that money and buy a nice new car to drive on their newly non-communist streets.

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