With the death Mr Miklós Szüts, the painter, our foundation lost one of its main spiritual supporters. We believed that we would like to invite such a personality to fill the vacant curator position who could carry on the legacy of Mr Miklós Szüts, the fact that he liked to think together with the team of MedSpot, that he loved us as we are, and that he considered our mission important, helping people in vulnerable situations. That’s why we asked Ms Júlia Király, who was in the same intellectual/cultural circle of thought with him, and with whom our late founder-curator had decades of family friendship and a determining human relation. Ms Júlia Király accepted the invitation, and we interviewed her on this occasion.

We arranged to meet just before the theatre performance in the Kamra, around the corner from the theatre. There was a smell of real coffee in the café, students in the gallery and some background noise, but we were not disturbed in our conversation. We moved so quickly from the reality of the café into the thoughts of family and friendship stories, and we didn’t even notice that we ended up in the centre of a parallel dimension reminiscent of past times.

  • I read recently that your whole family was made up of teachers and that you got and brought a lot from this family environment. I associated this with the attitude – I should say altruistic attitude – that you are member of the supervisory board of several different foundations and that you yourself are present as a patron of arts foundations that you have also helped to set up. Am I seeing this parallel correctly?

In that sense, you see very well that our family was a family of priests and teachers. My grandfather was a Reformed pastor from the region to the East of the Tisza River. My father and my sister were teachers of literature. In that respect, it is important that we are talking about literature teachers and Reformed pastors, because in this I see a very great openness to the ways of the world and to its betterment. In that sense, it was really a family tradition in our house to somehow make the small world around us a better place. I’m much luckier than my sister that I also became a teacher, but an economist as well. I’ve always been close to financial matters, and there’s no doubt that a teacher of literature who works close to finance is a teacher who is a little closer to money, so when I finished my career, even if I formally retired – although I’m still teaching now – I always wanted to give something back to society because I have received a lot. I’ve been lucky in my profession; I’ve always worked in places where I’ve been paid very fairly and then I feel now that I have something to give back. That’s why I really teach for free in professional colleges and I am involved in several NGOs like Amnesty, Helsinki Committee, TASZ, Transparency International, and in organisations close to the arts such as the Foundation of the Gólem Theatre and the Home Theatre’s Foundation of Mr Iván Fischer. So yes. For me it is very important to save values for the future, and the way to do that is through the arts. Without art, theatre, and literature there is no future, and this is what brought me close to Mr Miklós Szüts, with whom we were very much of the same mind.

  • Yes, that’s what I was about to say: you are taking over the place of Mr Miklós Szüts on the MedSpot board of trustees. You were friends for a long time, but to give you just one example, you stood together by the Freeszfe Society, you were thinking along the same lines. Am I right in seeing that you were often of the same opinion?

It was very, very strange, because Miklós was, in fact, not my oldest friend at all. I hope I have expressed myself accurately. So, the moment we met, we felt like we had known each other for a thousand years, even though this meeting was ten years ago. So, we met surprisingly late, although we had the same circle of friends, the same circle of acquaintances, we knew about each other, of course, but we only met in 2011 or 12 in Pécs at the National Theatre Showcase, where Ms Vojnich (Erzsébet Vojnich, painter, wife of Miklós Szüts, Ed.) was having an exhibition. Miklós and I started talking and we didn’t stop after that. Miklós and Erzsébet were among my ten closest friends.  Ever since I learned that a person can’t have fifty friends, but ten at the most, I’ve known who my ten closest friends are: no doubt they are included. Miklós and I came from totally different backgrounds and yet we had the same view of the world, and I am very proud that he wrote a very large part of his memoir ‘A földön élni ünnepély’ in my summer cottage in Surány, and I was one of the first readers of it. He was a fantastically open-minded, all-round man, believing in the possibility of making the world a better place just like me, with all his subtle irony. We had a similar ironic view of the world, I miss him very much, that’s all I can say.

  • We miss him too. I was just mentioning before our conversation that in the past years we have held our supervisory board or board of trustees’ meetings in his studio, and that will no longer be the case this year.

Hardly a day passed by that we didn’t talk to each other. But two or three times a week for sure. It’s terrifying that almost every other day I think about calling Miklós because I must discuss this or that with him and I still can’t get over the fact that I can’t do this. What was really quite fascinating about him was elusive: a painter who could talk about painting in such a way that people like me thought they would begin to understand; a person who was more proficient in literature than me, and although I was always proud of the fact that, well, I come from a literary family, so you cannot catch me in this field but it turned out that he read more than I did. He had a good grip not only of the literature of the seventeenth century, but of every aspect of the contemporary Hungarian literature. And who, besides, was also a fantastic people person. Once you sat down next to Miklós, it was enough to listen. So, I’m very honoured that you thought of me because of his… (sighs) passing away.

  • Actually, we would like to thank you for picking up where Miklós left off. I would like to refer to the idea you mentioned in a previous interview in connection with education. You mentioned that what you like to pass on to your university students is that they should dare to ask questions, that they should have the courage to have their own opinions and to express them, not just sit and wait to hear what the lecturer has to say.

That’s right!

– In a word, be different.

-Yes. Dare to be different.

  • Because I feel that MedSpot is like that too. It’s different. In some ways, of course, it’s apparent that people help. They also help children, that’s indisputable. But in crisis situations, we are there differently than the others, because we have a permanent team of psychologists and psychiatrists who help together with somatic doctors. Even now, as a small foundation, we are almost the only foundation that, as Sisyphus, tries every month to somehow help and release the extremely great trauma that people, especially children and families fleeing from the front line, are experiencing in Transcarpathia, in Uzhhorod and its surroundings, because of the war in the neighbouring country. This is what we have done so far, and we will continue to do so. In that respect I really feel that we are different. Did our differences play a role in your decision to accept the membership in the board of trustees?

What I knew about the foundation, I knew mostly from Miklós, and to a lesser extent from Dr András Spányik – or more precisely, I knew that András was one of the driving forces behind the foundation – and what always appealed to me about it: you said the word, crisis, which means to react to a crisis situation in an unconventional way, to be there in the most difficult moments. I remember when you bought the ambulance and provided support in quite impossible circumstances. I think that this foundation takes an awareness-raising part in relation to the today’s regime in Hungary, which communicates that everything is fine here, everything is solved, the health care is perfect, the education is perfect, there are no crisis situations, and in the meantime, the horrible thing that happened recently…

– Yes, the criminal case in the school at Bőny…

The stabbing at Bőny… I think that the whole philosophy and thinking of this foundation is about how to prevent such cases, how to make society such that these things cannot happen. How to build an organisation there, how to help a way of thinking that opposes the idea that there is no problem, everything is solved and anyway: don’t get smart! I am very happy that this foundation acts smart.

– Yes, the foundation deals with how a group of people in a traumatic situation, children, and adults, can be supported and helped in the long term to process the experienced traumas in time. It would be an important task, knowing the history of the 20th century.

So, I think it is one of those institutions that are trying to improve something in our world, with their own tools, in their field. These are big words, but it is still true, and Miklós and I had always the same way of thinking about this matter. Sometimes you have to get involved in politics, but basically the important thing is to try to change the society in smaller issues. The legend of Sisyphus is close to my heart anyway: my father’s favourite hero was Sisyphus, because he always said that you should roll a stone up a hill even if you know it will roll down. The faith to see the meaning and perseverance in seemingly hopeless tasks, must be passed on to others, so I am very happy to be part of a Sisyphus-like foundation in some way.

MedSpot Foundation, 2024