Love Palace - Op-Ed

Columns and vaults, steps and terraces, courtyards and shrubs, corridors and rooms, towers and arches, pictures and antiques, stone statues and conical roofs, balconies and halls, murals and collectibles, circular domes and cylindrical buildings, ceramics and mosaics, statues of Hungarian kings and others of saints, a palace on terraces, with multiple architectural styles, predominantly Roman, built with a feeling of divine love, created from red brick and stone a beauty that dazzles the eye.

Their faces denote their characters; a statue of a man whose features speak of passion and spontaneity, enthusiasm, ability and giving, determination, pride, foresight and intelligence, and a statue of a wife with a calm, dignified beauty, and a spirit of faith and certainty, similar to images of angels and saints, she seems from another world, that came to our land with a lofty, sad, alienated feeling, but she found in it someone who filled her soul with the inspiration of a divine, gushing and permanent love, that transcended the limits of marital harmony and the love of offspring to immortality after life in a palace in the name of the family, that was rumored that it was the Taj Mahal of Hungary.

 The palace's magnificence lies in the beauty of its craftsmanship and the richness of the spirit of its builder, not in the price of its building materials. A palace built by the architect and sculptor Jeno Bori during summer vacations over forty years until he passed away, a palace whose stones reveal the secrets and motives of love through poems and writings.

The texts say that God is love, and love is a path to God, the writings declare feelings of flirtation, and the words convey them in letters of light; That her face makes him feel ecstasy from the Creator, that he feels the spirit of God when he sees her, that her smile is light, her name is a treasure, and the tunes of her voice are music, and that he hopes that she will not grow old so that the wrinkles on her face will not hide from people the beauty of her soul through the freshness of her youth.

 Jeno Bori, a university professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Budapest, born in 1879, loved his colleague, the painter Ilona, ​​and received scholarships in Germany and Italy. He took the initiative to integrate the study of sculpture with architecture in his college curricula.

The Austrian Empire hired him for his fame in sculpting statues, some of which were in Sarajevo, where the Archduke of Austria was assassinated. He was inspired by one of its churches to design the palace. Instead of the brutal climate of World War I, he chose at the end of it in 1919 to build the palace in his hometown. He took advantage of the four-month summer vacation of the college each year to build the palace himself with a little amount of help from others. The palace became a residence for the family and his descendants after him, who maintained it, including the artistic images of others, and made it open to visitors as a tourist attraction that added to the city's fame.

 The palace contains a temple of love with drawings and writings, that love that was his motive, path, goal, and the basis of his faith, as he wrote on its walls the motive; God is love, and love is a path to God who dedicated his life to serving Him. Love for him is a spiritual worship and a life practice, a regular practice until death. Love is work and behavior not just passing whims and intermittent relationships, moments of revelation and acts of worship disconnected from daily behavior.

Love is life, and the basis of creation and existence, like water and air.

 Nothing is without it. The palace has become a pilgrimage for those who are inspired by nobility and those who want their actions to tell it, those who aspire to purity and clarity, creativity and giving, those who see the face of God in others, and make life an epic of service and goodness, uninterrupted goodness, transmitted to people and generations, a love that reminds us that the world is good, even when the world is turbulent. Faith teaches us understanding and containment, and inspires us with patience and mercy.

Amid the evils of this world, there are always angels among us, even if they are human beings with angelic qualities.