Eight Hundred in Budapest: 'Abdu'l-Bahá in Hungary

In the spring of 1913, in the closing weeks of His extended European journey, 'Abdu'l-Bahá traveled from Stuttgart to Budapest at the invitation of Hungarian peace and Theosophical societies. He arrived in early April. The visit was brief — a matter of days — but the effect, as the *Star of the West* reported in its following issues, was lasting.

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> About eight hundred people attended the public meetings — and a > small nucleus of the Faith began.

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The Master spoke at gatherings of the Hungarian Peace Society, of the Theosophical Society of Budapest, and at smaller meetings hosted by individual seekers. The audiences were varied: peace advocates concerned about the rising tensions in central Europe, theosophists interested in Eastern wisdom, Hungarian intellectuals curious about the figure who had drawn London's and Paris's attention the year before.

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Two distinguished visitors paid Him formal calls. Professor Ármin Vámbéry, the venerable Hungarian Orientalist who had spent years in Persia and Central Asia in his youth, came to greet a Bahá'í figure he had long heard about but never met. Vámbéry's own scholarly work had touched on the Bábí period; the meeting between the two — both then in old age — was charged with a mutual recognition the Master would later acknowledge in a Tablet. Professor Ignaz Goldziher, the great Hungarian Islamicist, also came.

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Among the visitors was a young Hungarian Bahá'í named Leopold Stark. The Master, before His departure, charged Stark with the work of establishing the first nucleus of the Faith in Budapest. The charge was small in form but very large in scope: Stark was to gather, hold, and slowly grow a body of believers in a city where, before April 1913, none had existed.

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The *Star of the West* reported the visit in clear terms because the editors knew its significance. The Master had been to England, France, Germany, Switzerland, Austria. He had now reached Hungary. The trail of small communities He had been leaving across the West — a Bahá'í group in London, in Paris, in Stuttgart, now in Budapest — was the slow physical foundation on which the European Faith would be built across the long century He had already sketched.

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Stark would, in fact, fulfil the charge. Hungarian Bahá'ís met through the years of the Great War, the years between the wars, and into the long decades when, under successive regimes, the small community would have to learn to survive. The nucleus 'Abdu'l-Bahá had named in 1913 had not, by His passing in 1921, become a great body. But it was there. And it has remained there ever since.

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