Gordon McKechnie

In Kauppakatu, the pedestrianised main street of Lappeenranta , there is a granite statue of a seal lying on a low granite pedestal. It looks winsomely at passers by, as if hoping for mercy and life from those who might be inclined to consign it to imminent extinction. This is a monument to the Saimaa seal, the freshwater ringed seal that was left behind in Lake Saimaa at the end of the last ice age. The Saimaa ringed seal in Finland is one of only three populations of freshwater seal in the world. The other two are in Russia , one in nearby Lake Ladoga and the other far from salt water in Lake Baikal in Siberia . How the Baikal seals, nearly 100,000 of them, came to be in Lake Baikal - hundreds of kilometres from the sea and at 455 metres above sea level - remains a mystery. I asked several people I met in Lappeenranta where I might have the best chance of seeing one of these local Saimaa seals. The answer was always along the same lines: "I have lived in Lappeenra...

This article was recently published by Hungarian Review (Budapest) under the title "CSARODA AND THE HUNGARIAN REFORMATION:  A TRAVEL ESSAY". It was published in two parts. Part 1 was published in March 2017 (Volume VIII, No. 2) and Part 2 was published in May 2017 (Volume VIII, No. 3). In 1946, a Hungarian poet stood in front of the Reformation Wall in the Parc des Bastions in Geneva . Gyula Illyés's poem - Before the Reformation Monument in Geneva - is now regarded as one of the most important Hungarian poems of the 20th century, standing alongside his better known 1950 poem One Sentence on Tyranny . In his poem, Gyula Illyés (1902-1983), in his Paris youth a left-wing activist from a Roman Catholic paternal background, asks the question "Do you believe there would be a Hungarian nation if there had been no Calvin?" His answer is "I do not think so." * You cannot climb the tower of the church in Csaroda. But if you could you ...