Gordon McKechnie

This article was first published in Hungarian Review in January 2019 First we heard what sounded like gunfire, then came a shrieking sound like a festive rocket being launched. Only then did we see rising in the sky above the vines a great mumuration of starlings, circling and swirling in great arcs, coming together, coming apart, reforming. Thousands of starlings in a fast-moving cloud of their own making. For ten minutes we watched the spectacle as afternoon turned to evening and the rain set in and the hailstones began to fall. "We do have problems with hail, and with the 'frozen saints' - late frosts in mid-May. But the starlings are a bigger problem." A flock of starlings can strip a vineyard of its ripe grapes in a very short space of time. We sat indoors at the Taschner Winery, a modern building that houses an expanding enterprise, on the road out of Sopron that leads to Balf. Kurt Taschner opened a bottle of 2018 Irsai Olivér - a white grap...

The article that follows was published by Hungarian Review in two parts. Part 1 was published in its November 2018 issue and Part 2 in January  2019. Four hundred years ago, on 23 May 1618, three men were thrown from a window in Prague Castle . Until moments before their defenestration they had been working in the Old Royal Palace , in the Catholic administration of the Habsburg Emperor. Those who threw them out of the window were members of the Bohemian Estates - the parliament of the day - Protestants increasingly concerned by the persecution of their fellow Protestants throughout Habsburg realms, and the erosion of religious and political liberties in Bohemia. Historians have taken the 1618 Defenestration of Prague as marking the beginning of the Thirty Years' War, a conflict that raged ferociously, mostly across Bohemia and other parts of the Holy Roman Empire , from 1618 to 1648, drawing in the armies of most of the European powers of the time. It was the ...