The Girl Who Cried Pearl And Laughed Rose: Escape From Office Day

One week ago was the so called 'Office Sports Day'. What is it? The entire bureau just take a friendly tournament for a day and singing and laughing arm-in-arm like a happy fami-
...in the McDonald's perhaps or in a parallel world...

For me - who is not a sporty person at all, more like the living anti-movement - it was just another 'I wanna go home!' day. You can call me grumpy and antisocial again - I am -, but I'm not intrested in 'having fun with colleagues whom I doesn't know and doesn't want to know at all...' Trust me some of them are really strange... The meaning of the so called 'social life' for me is not this foolishness, rather my family, friends and my bunny. Finished.
And if you think we just run or play some football and other things in a sports day then you are naive. The games were actually crappy tasks like "wheelbarrow race" [You are the wheelbarrow... Imagine it with the colleague you hate the most! Oh but don't...], fishing competition [at a pond where there is a warning sign 'Fishing is forbidden', because fishes are unedible and sheltered. They actually wanted to eat them for lunch... Congrat.], jumping with a biciycle on a table [They were older people as well and just hope they had life insurance...], boat pulling [Someone is sitting in the boat and you have to pull her/him to the other side of the pod. Just hope not the 200kg colleague wants to sit in the boat...] and so on...

After I put my signature to the attendance register, with one of my colleague - who do not prefer hypocrisy too and doesn't like doing freaky games either, especially because of her back is injured, but they didn't care at all - we just silently stepped down from the scene to take a walk in the nearabout before we went home. Veszprém has a huge parkland under its Castle Hill with many smaller historical monuments. So we just went for a walk to see the newly renovated garden with the 'Margaret ruins'. You can laugh if you want but I'm a real history geek, so just some ruins can throw me into a fever... especially if it belongs to my beloved Middle Ages.

view from the valley of Séd onto the Castle Hill

So the 'Margaret ruins' was once a cloister named 'St. Catherine Dominican Nunnery' [Szent Katalin Domonkos Apácakolostor]. It built around 1240. The cloister probably ruined when the Ottomans besieged Veszprem in 1552 [this time the whole country seized by the Ottoman Empire]. The ruins had been excavated in 1938.

It was not something famous building, I just like walking among its stone walls.

Two ladies lived here in those times whereof this monument is significant, Saint Margaret and Blessed Helen of Hungary. Although I'm not religious at all I do interested in some saints lives, like Saint Margaret's too. She was born on the exact day like me on 27th of January [crazy Aquarius] and my mom's name is also Margaret.
She followed her own four simple orders: "to love God, to despise myself, to hate nobody, to judge noone". Easy-peasy, she thought. Her life was short, she lived only 28 years. She died from sepsis after the many years of serious self-mortification... She flagellated herself, wore an iron girdle, cilice on her head [sackcloth with inwardly-pointing tines] and shoes spiked with nails... Ok she was freakin' hardcore I think... I never agree with these things although I was a devoted catholic for years! Maybe my faith was not that high enough... Haha
But it was the Middle Ages and these things was normal among cloister walls to feel themselves closer to Christ's sufferings...?! Ironically these were the times when the 'pre-Inquisition' started torturing people anyway no matter that the person was religious or not... so what was the point to torture herself, she would have been glad not being caged by them. [Humanity is uncomprehended for me...] Anyway she was the daughter of our current king, Béla the IV and his wife Maria Laskarina. In those times the Tatars attacked our country. They brutally assaulted everyone who came their way. After a bigger victorious battle at Muhi they wanted to capture our king once and for all. On the way to Buda they suddenly took withdrawal and leaved our country. We never knew what was the sudden cause for their act, but our ancestors were happy of course. Yeah! They gone. "...And there was much rejoicing!" So the king and queen and all the Hungarian people thought it was a miracle and grace by God. So they gave the only 3 years old Margaret to God as a sacrificial gift. She lived in this little cloister in Veszprem until her 9th birthday. Then she needed to leave Veszprém to start her punkish lifestyle from now on the Island of Rabbits. It sounds Monty Pythonically again but not, this was todays Margaret-island/Margit-sziget at Budapest, later named after her. There were another cloister in those times [now ruins] and her grave is on this island as well. This cloister was near to the king's temporary residence.
I don't know why they called it 'Island of Rabbits', there never hopped a single bunny even on Easter... maybe a long long time ago this was a hunting place or maybe historians misspelled something because in original Latin it called 'Insula Leporum'. According on dictionaries the word 'leporum' means "rabbits" or "pleasures", both are nouns in genitive plural. If it meant to be the 'Island of Pleasures' it explains many things... although Google Translator simply [mis]translated 'leporum' as 'boy'...??? 'Island of Boys' ~Hmmm It's getting more interesting... Hehe

Where was I? So she was the princess after all and later the king just forgot everything about his pledge to God. He needed to marry Margaret to the Czech or the Polish king for diplomatical reasons of course. But Margaret was devoted for the cloister and God and simply told her father: -I would cut my nose down instead of being disloyal to God! [I bet she would do it!]

She hated the fact that she was born a 'blue blood' and everyone handle her courteously, so she started mortificated herself more than anyone, slept on the stone floor, ate less than a mouse, did the most disgusting tasks like cleaning the latrine, nursed the most sick people with the most disgusting diseases. After all she became the idol of the nunnery anyway. [So maybe she mortificated herself more to avoid the sin of proudness...? Sorry, bad joke.]

Margaret died on this island in 1270 and according on legends after her death her body avoid the decomposition for 3 weeks and it scented like rose. It sounds fairly but imagine how her body looked like from the many years of brutal self-torturing... ~Uhh Rose scent is my b... bunny.

About the other lady Helen the Blessed I only know that she was the teacher of Margaret here in Veszprém and according on catholic legends she always levitated during prays, she was a reputed stigmatist and "given to ecstasies, and lilies of light grew from her hands during prayers". [1] She would be the living flower-power hippie dream. Haha