László Stachó is an ethnomusicologist, psychologist and musician.
Spring School participants, after Holi celebration. Photo courtesy of the author.
Even as a somewhat unusual child, I was passionately committed to preserving the heritage of a rural culture on the brink of disappearance. At the age of 13, I won a competition organised by a major municipal museum in my native Hungary, presenting the findings of my ethnographic field trips in the region where my grandparents lived. From that time on, I began building a significant collection of folklore documents, photographs, and artifacts dating back 100 to 200 years. Among these, my collection includes photographs I took as a child in the early 1990s, capturing peasant architecture in Northern Hungary, much of which has since been completely demolished. My goal has always been to document the fascinating remnants of a premodern culture, one that had remained largely unchanged since the Middle Ages but has now vanished in the West. Lastly, in 2015, I purchased the ruined traditional peasant house of my great-grandparents in a northern Hungarian village with the goal of fully reconstructing it and opening there the area’s first house museum. For this project, I have brought together architecture professionals and friends to relearn and exclusively use historic technologies in building with clay, hay, horse and cow manure.
Spring school participants outside Jyapu Academy. Photo courtesy of the author.
With this motivation and interest, I travelled to Kathmandu to attend the Heritage as Placemaking Spring School. As a classical music professional, I was thrilled not only to visit stunning historical sites and observe religious rituals, but also to experience authentic folk music and dance performances at the Echoes in the Valley Festival. The Spring School’s rich, engaging, and stimulating program made my first visit to South Asia one of the most captivating journeys of my life. I often share stories with friends and colleagues about our time in Kathmandu, emphasizing our interactions with researchers and policymakers – both the Nepalese ethnographers and experts, as well as the researchers who accompanied us. I also highlight the wonderful fellows – with whom we had so much fun not only during our sessions in Jyapu Samaj but also while recording sounds of Patan from the streets, not to mention all the other common programmes – our participation in the Charya programme and the enchanting Echoes in the Valley festival, the meeting with the Charya masters and the Jhijhiya dancers, as well as our visit to Harisiddhi, where we not only witnessed the fascinating Mask Dance but also engaged with the performers – and the most memorable and valuable aspect of this all was that we felt like insiders wherever we went. Finally, my lifelong passion for heritage protection was greatly enriched by our thought-provoking discussions during project presentations: I feel more attuned to and integrated into contemporary trends in ethnographic research. But perhaps most cherished of all are the lasting friendships I forged during this unforgettable journey.
