Reaching The Point of No Return – Schloss Esterhazy & Haydnsaal (Rendezvous With An Obscure Destiny #41)

Certain places in Eastern Europe haunt my imagination long after I have left them. That is because though I have left those places, they never leave me. On some random Tuesday, years after a visit, a place resurfaces inside of me. Suddenly it becomes so real that I feel an unbearable urge to return. This is followed by the stark realization that I have probably made my only one and only visit there. A depressing thought, but understandable. I was lucky to ever travel so far and wide across a region that captured my curiosity. I should be grateful for all those opportunities to visit. And yet I want more, too much of Eastern Europe was never going to be enough. Greed sometimes gets the better of me in these moments.

I want to go back, so I can feel the way I did on that first visit. This is a fool’s game that I love to play. Even though deep down inside I realize that romanticizing my own past travels is little more than self-seduction. Thus, I try to put thoughts of a return trip out of my mind. I resign myself to the fact that returning to places I have never left, at least mentally, would only lead to a letdown. These places are what I call the neverlands. Places that it pains me to know I will never return to again. Places that have passed my own personal point of no return. Strangely enough, a place I rarely thought about after visiting, has now come back to remind me that there are places deep within me that I will only return to mentally.

Provincial Glamor – A Candy-Coated Confection

For reasons likely to always remain unknown to me, I keep having recurring thoughts of Schloss Esterhazy in Eisenstadt, Austria. This is not entirely unexpected because the palace is one of the more memorable attractions I have experienced. A visit to this candy-coated confection covered in an eyepopping coat of cream is not to be missed if you find yourself in the Burgenland. This Austrian province is one of the least visited in the country. Located in the far eastern part of the country, in many respects it is un-Austrian. Rather than towering alpine peaks, there is rich cropland, rolling hills, and low mountains. Though Vienna is never more than an hour or two away at most, the rural nature of the Burgenland provides a compelling counterpoint to the sophistication and high culture of the Austrian capital. Eisenstadt is the closest thing to an urban oasis in the Burgenland with plenty of elegant buildings, immaculately swept streets, and industrious Austrians uber focused on the business at hand.

The Schloss Esterhazy is Eisenstadt’s gleaming set piece. There is no way anyone passing through Eisenstadt could miss the palace. The Schloss is glamorous to the point of glitzy, a Baroque attraction on steroids. That it is found in the Burgenland, makes its shock value that much more sensational. The exterior is the apotheosis of aristocratic architectural sensibilities. The interior is not too bad either. The experience of Esterhazy Palace is like having your cake and eating it too, in the most aesthetic sense of those words. The exterior and interior match one another in exquisiteness.

For me, one specific room in the Schloss keeps coming to mind, the Haydnsaal. This ornate piece of architectural fantasia was used for banquets and festivals. The room takes its name from Joseph Haydn, the Esterhazy court composer whose works of musical brilliance were often debuted in what is still today a perfect acoustical environment. The ceiling of the Haydnsaal is covered in a swirl of beautiful frescoes portraying scenes taken from classical works. To think of the moment, I stood in the Haydnsaal brings me the greatest of pleasure. To realize that I am unlikely to ever stand there again, fills me with an equal amount of sadness.

Fantasyland – Wanderer's World

I have searched my mind as much as I have searched Eastern Europe for the reasons why certain places occur and reoccur in my memory. One of the conclusions I have come to is that those places most vivid to me are the ones for which I cannot or will not ever return. This is a sobering thought. A few years ago, I had a chance of returning to Eisenstadt, revisiting the Schloss Esterhazy, and standing once again in the Haydnsaal, but did not take it. The reason for not taking this opportunity now escapes me. The memory of that failure does not. I now see this as part of my destiny and the future of my travels in the region. The no return policy that plagues me is for a very good reason.

Forgive me for stating the obvious about my Eastern European obsession, but there is so much to see and so little time. It is one thing to say this and quite another to realize it. Lately, I have come to the understanding that I have been running out of time in my Eastern European travels from the day I first set foot on the tarmac at the airport in Sofia, Bulgaria over a decade ago. Back then my head was spinning so much from sensory overload that I could not conceive that I was already running out of time. For an obsessive, there can never be enough time to pursue their passion to the most extreme lengths. Eastern Europe offered me a sprawling canvas with so much history, travel and culture that I could conceivably go on forever. That was not realistic. Then again, realism is unromantic. Fantasyland was where I found myself. The Haydnsaal was one iteration of that fantastical world in which I wandered.

Numbers Games – Watching The Clock

My passion for places such as the Schloss Esterhazy showed just how little reality meant to me. That was until one day I came to a stunning realization. I was closer to the end of my travels than to the beginning of them. I hope that this would turn out to be an unfounded fear. A manifestation of too many close calls with mortality. This is the type of thought that I assume many have while growing older and becoming aware of their limitations. The thought of twenty more trips to Eastern Europe is as impossible to imagine as the first twenty were to complete. Obsessive travelers would tell me that this is not a numbers game.

My retort would be that age is a numbers game, the price of flight tickets is a numbers game, the time taken to travel is a numbers game, life expectancy is a numbers game. Why should my travel life expectancy be any different? The problem is that my Eastern European travels used to be guided by intuition. Now they are being foreshowed by a premonition. Perhaps it is an overstatement to say that this is an intimation of mortality, more like a confrontation with reality. All I ever really wanted was an enhanced version of reality, one like Schloss Esterhazy and the Haydnsaal. The memory of which is now inseparable from the thought that I have reached my point of return.