Широка страна моя родная, “wide is my native land, Russia” — there’s room in it for every people. Just as Araz picked out the Azerbaijani photographs yesterday in his post from Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky’s grand imperial Russian photo project, I also began browsing — and found at least two photographs with Hungarian connections among the 1902 color images digitized by the Library of Congress.
A search for “Hungary” in the database yields a single image. Its original caption has not survived, but based on a 2001 proposal by electrical engineer Paul Cooper and military foreign-policy expert Martin Chadzynski, the librarians gave it the title: “Generators made in Budapest in the machine hall of the Jolotan hydroelectric power station on the Murghab River (between 1905 and 1915).”
The image in the Library of Congress catalogue is the result of Blaise Agüeras y Arcas’s 2004 automatic reconstruction. The other version is Walter Frankhausen’s (Walter Studio) 2001 manual reconstruction.
The Joloten Hindukush hydroelectric plant was built in 1909 on the Murghab River, in the Transcaspian Oblast (Закаспийская область), that is, in what is today southeastern Turkmenistan. In 1887, Tsar Alexander III purchased here, near the ancient city of Merv (today a World Heritage site), a vast tract of steppe from Turkmen tribes in order to found the modern successor of the legendary fertile oasis of Merv. On this imperial estate, by settling khokhol — Ukrainian — colonists, he created a vast modern model farm, a kind of early technopolis, with extensive irrigation, flourishing cotton processing, and other industries. The Hindukush power plant supplied them with electricity; with its 1,350 kW capacity, it was the most powerful hydroelectric station in Tsarist Russia. (For comparison: in 1917, the total capacity of the thousands of Russian hydro plants was 19 MW.)
A postcard mailed on January 24, 1911, showing the Hindukush hydroelectric plant. From the series “Views of Turkestan”
Prokudin-Gorsky visited the region twice, first in 1906–1907 and again in 1911. Altogether 68 photographs survive from the Merv district: besides the ruins of ancient Merv and ethnographic images of Turkmen shepherds, they mainly show cotton fields, cotton-processing plants, and the hydroelectric station. Of the latter — which he could obviously have photographed only on his 1911 trip — the Library of Congress preserves six images, including the one above. Since the registration album of the journey has not survived, the Library of Congress catalogue does not specify the location of many of the photographs; these were identified by the international project “The Legacy of Prokudin-Gorsky.”
At the time, only the Ganz Works in Hungary were capable of producing generators of such capacity. The company was founded in 1845 by the Swiss-born Ábrahám Ganz as an iron foundry and machine factory; its original plant still stands in Buda and has been open as a museum since 1964. His successor, András Mechwart, added an electrical department in 1869 and turned the company into a world-renowned enterprise and one of the largest industrial groups in the Monarchy. Ganz & Co. Danubius Electrical Machine, Wagon and Ship Factory supplied machinery across Europe and Asia. I myself have encountered their old ship cranes in Odessa. After the war, the company was nationalized, and in 1959 merged with the neighboring locomotive and wagon factory under the name Ganz-MÁVAG. In my childhood, this city-sized block of buildings in Kőbánya was a city within the city, employing a large part of the district’s working class. We have even quoted their choir’s “Song of Lenin” here before. Then came the regime change: the company was dismantled and, in the name of privatization, sold off for peanuts — a process in which I myself took part as an Italian interpreter. Today the building complex hosts Europe’s largest Chinese market; its most valuable asset is a small Chinese eatery that I still consider one of the best Chinese kitchens in Budapest.
The Hindukush hydroelectric plant in Jolotan, however, survived even the regime change. For over a hundred years it has been operating continuously with its original equipment, which exactly a century after Prokudin-Gorsky, in 2011, timmekun documented in a photo series on yandex.ru. It is clear that nothing has changed in the machine hall: the same floor tiles, the same window frames, the same machines, the same light falling across the floor. And the inscription on the brass plaque is exactly the same as it was more than a century ago.
Ганцовская электр[отехническая] комп[анія] въ Будапештѣ – Ganz Electrical Works, Budapest
Importing cutting-edge Western equipment was not unusual in Tsarist Russia. In another photograph by Prokudin-Gorsky, in the carpentry workshop of the Zlatoust ironworks, we see a sawing machine that, according to its inscription, was manufactured in Reinickendorf, Berlin — just a few S-Bahn stops from where I am writing this now. The Reinickendorf factory still exists. I wonder whether the Zlatoust one does too — and whether the machine is still there.
I’ll write about Prokudin-Gorsky’s other Hungarian-related photograph in a future post.
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