In this survey, I want to focus on Vera Bácskai and her contribution to the growth of European urban history. The story I will tell is very much a personal narrative as I became a close friend and collaborator of Vera. However, I hope my account – looking first at the background, then at her transnational activities and concluding with an overall assessment of her work – will shed wider light on her role as a leading European urban historian as well as her many-sided impact on the formation of the field in Hungary and beyond.

First then the background. I first met Vera Bácskai in the 1970s at the University of Leicester in Britain. I had recently been appointed a lecturer in the Economic History Department and been given a small office next to that of Professor H.J. (Jim) Dyos (1921–78), then the famous patron and co-inventor of British urban history, along with Asa Briggs (1921–2016), David Reeder (1931–2005) and others. Dyos had made his reputation in the 1960s by forging links with American urban history, then a dynamic field, but, with the decline of American studies and Britain joining the European Common Market in 1973, Dyos made a pivot towards Europe and went on major lecture tours on the continent promoting urban history.Footnote ¹ In consequence, he had numerous European visitors, often arranged by the British Council, and one was Vera Bácskai. Graced with a sunny, sociable style, Dyos called me into his office to meet her. I recall her then, stylish, unassuming, but clearly someone with a strong personality.

Not surprisingly, given her involvement in the Hungarian opposition movement and her victimization by the Communist regime,Footnote ² I never met Vera again until the summer of 1990. By then, Soviet oppression in Eastern and Central Europe was collapsing and Vera had already managed to help establish in Hungary the István Hajnal Circle,Footnote ³ an important group of historians, archivists and local historians interested in social history. In the West, too, the political climate was increasingly propitious for European scientific co-operation. The new momentum of the European Commission under Jacques Delors and the negotiations for a European Union and currency leading to the Maastricht Treaty encouraged a growing public enthusiasm for a European vision that enjoyed strong support in the universities. In Britain, Jim Dyos had died in 1978, but the 1980s had seen the advent of the Leicester Centre for Urban History and the Centre for Metropolitan History at London University. European urban history had also started to take off, with small international conferences promoted by the French historians Maurice Aymard and Bernard Lepetit (1948–96) in Paris and elsewhere. In the late 1980s, the European Commission launched major new initiatives for educational co-operation.Footnote ⁴

This was the context of my next meeting with Vera in 1990. The immediate trigger was my search for a Hungarian collaborator for a book project on European small towns. Maurice Aymard suggested I contact György Granasztói (1938–2016), a leading Hungarian historian, and he in turn recommended Vera. I recall ringing Vera late at night, when the rest of my family had gone to bed, because the telephone connections to Budapest were so slow and difficult. This was an exciting time for international co-operation, but the infrastructure problems often made communication complicated and unsure.

Happily, Vera Bácskai agreed to contribute to an international conference that I organized at Leicester on European Small Towns in July 1990. And in turn she invited me to the conference of the Hajnal Circle that she was arranging that June at Keszthely on Lake Balaton; other foreign participants included Penelope Corfield and Derek Keene (1942–2021). The conference was highly memorable. The Hungarian participants were brimming with enthusiasm; papers were interesting but varied in quality; the slide projector caught fire when an American professor was using it, much to his annoyance. Vera led a late-night swim on Midsummer eve in a misty mysterious Balaton and there was a spirited party in a small country vineyard. The next month, Vera travelled to Leicester for the Small Towns conference and wide-ranging discussions about future collaboration. Pan-European urban history had started to gain traction with Vera playing a significant part.

Vera Bácskai's paper at Leicester, in which she compared Hungarian, Czech and Polish small towns, was published in an edited volume on Small Towns in Early Modern Europe.Footnote ⁵ Her work on small towns, along with her other numerous publications on the Hungarian urban system, the Hungarian bourgeoisie and on the rise of modern Budapest, contributed to the advance of European urban history in a number of ways. First, because her publications were based on detailed archival research and rejected the Soviet-style, sham-Marxist terminology which had distorted and degraded some of the older urban studies on Eastern and Central Europe, rendering them virtually unintelligible. Secondly, because her work made accessible to a Western audience new regional research which shed light on current debates (for example, Vera's chapter on Budapest in the volume Capital Cities and their Hinterlands Footnote ⁶ which explored the controversy over whether capital cities were parasites or engines of growth). Thirdly, because her output exemplified the New Urban History, first evolving at this time, which was comparative; which was interdisciplinary; and which was concerned with long-term perspectives: her chapter in the volume on Small Towns in Early Modern Europe incorporates many of the new approaches. Fourthly, through her work (and that of others) Eastern and Central Europe started to be seen as a distinctive and historic urban region within the European system.

By the early 1990s, her growing research reputation abroad, as well as her networking skills, meant that Vera Bácskai was becoming an important broker in European collaboration in urban history. One can illustrate this by reference to several programmes in which she was involved.

In 1990, the European Commission launched the TEMPUS programme funding co-operation between West European and ex-Soviet bloc universities. Following discussions with Vera at Keszthely and Leicester that summer, the Centre for Urban History at the University of Leicester co-ordinated a successful TEMPUS application by a consortium of nine European universities – with Vera Bácskai's new fledgling Economic History Department at Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE) in Budapest as a key partner. Co-operation with Budapest worked remarkably smoothly. Funding from Brussels was provided for new computers and library books, which were dispatched from Leicester; Hungarian students came to Leicester and other consortium partners for individual study; and Vera and a good number of Hungarian students participated in TEMPUS postgraduate workshops on European urban history. The first was at Leuven University in Belgium 1991 which brought together 50 students from Eastern and Western Europe as well as senior professors in the field, including Herman Diederiks (1937–95), Heinz Schilling, Raymond van Uytven (1933–2018) and Walter Prevenier. A second urban history workshop, hosted by Vera, was held at Keszthely in 1992 with about 40 students from Hungary, Poland and Western countries. These were important steps in promoting transnational co-operation in European urban history, seeking as they did to foster a future generation of urbanists. Among the student participants, indeed, were a number of present-day professors of urban history in European universities. The TEMPUS programme firmly anchored Hungarian studies in the growing European network of urban historians.

When the TEMPUS programme came to an end after two years, Vera Bácskai sought other ways of maintaining European collaboration. After discussions in Budapest, Vera proposed that Leicester and Budapest apply to the Soros Foundation for funding to enable Hungarian students to take Leicester Masters Degrees in Urban History. With the support of George Soros’ cultural advisor in New York and the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, remarkably enlightened in those days, funding was secured for one or two Hungarian students a year to come to the Leicester Centre for Urban History. Every May for several years, interviews were held in Budapest, jointly with the Soros Office and the British embassy, to choose students. Those students who came to the Centre worked hard and were much appreciated. It was an important collaboration which not only benefited Vera's department but boosted Leicester's standing as an international Centre for Urban History. Vera always recognized that for international co-operation to succeed it needed to be mutually beneficial.

Last but not least was Vera's contribution to the growth and success of the European Association for Urban History (EAUH). Nowadays, EAUH conferences are large, even lavish events with major research, publishing and networking aspects. But the early years of the Association were problematic, and its eventual success owed much to the loyalty and input of people like Vera, the Dutch historian Herman Diederiks, its first secretary, also a good friend of Vera, and a few others. The Association originated with a small grant from the European Commission in 1989 and a further grant a year or so later to expand activity to Eastern Europe. In 1991, Vera hosted a meeting of the international committee of the Association in Budapest. Increasingly, however, there was a problem of finance. To rescue the situation, Diederiks and I decided to organize the first open biennial conference in Amsterdam in 1992 which attracted 140 participants including Vera and several young scholars from Eastern and Central Europe. By then, most of the first committee had disappeared. At the next conference, at Strasbourg in 1994, hosted by Jean-Luc Pinol and Denis Menjot, the new committee comprised a sparse handful of members including Vera Bácskai. Still the conference was quite successful, attracting 350 scholars, and Vera offered to hold the third conference in Budapest in 1996.Footnote ⁷

This was a huge challenge, for reasons which are difficult to fully appreciate nowadays. Even in Western Europe, organizing a big open international conference in the 1990s was a major undertaking, reliant on European postal services for circulating programmes, submitting proposals and registration forms; financed through primitive bank transfers and cheques; dependent on photocopying and faxing papers. It was a potential nightmare with the risk of catastrophe (as occurred to at least one international congress about this time). Predictably, the difficulties in former Soviet bloc countries like Hungary were much worse. On top of the issues already mentioned, there was an absence of good international phone connections; the inadequacy of the banking system; the tension in universities like ELTE between reformers like Vera and the reactionary old guard of professors; the absence of financial sponsors; the limited experience of conference agencies, and so on.

Despite all these difficulties, the Budapest conference was a great achievement, attracting 270 participants, including many from the West who had never been to Eastern and Central Europe before. Research was presented on many new aspects of European urban history, particularly on Central and Eastern European cities. A long opening lecture was given by Heinz Schilling on Reformation and Counter-Reformation cities; more fun, perhaps, was the concluding lecture by Penelope Corfield who sang town songs boldly to an animated audience. Also memorable was the evening boat trip on the Danube, which enabled us to view the city's architectural splendour, now all lit up unlike in Soviet times.

The success of the conference owed much to Vera's hard work and the backing of the Soros Foundation which not only provided funding for conference assistance and student bursaries but also made available the bright new premises of the Central European University for the conference sessions. For the European Association, Budapest was a pivotal conference because it saw the first meeting of a newly expanded international committee which had the very effective and efficient Pim Kooij (1945–2016) from Groningen as its new Dutch secretary (Diederiks had died the previous year). After Budapest in 1996 the European Association never looked back.

Vera Bácskai was not only president of the European Association from 1994 to 1996, but an active member of the international committee from 1991 until her retirement in 2004. As treasurer during this time, I found her an invaluable colleague. She was calm, judicious and supportive. She did not waste her time in useless arguments. Rather, she concentrated on furthering the Association's activities and promoting the interests of young scholars not just from Hungary but from Central and Eastern Europe in general, supporting their applications for sessions, bursaries and so forth. In this way, she boosted the transnational outreach and ambition of the Association which it retains today.

To sum up, Vera Bácskai's role in the formation of European urban history in the 1990s and after was multi-dimensional. It was founded on her research reputation and major publications on many key aspects of urban history, bringing a crucial East European dimension to our understanding. It was underpinned by her participation and support for EU projects and bilateral programmes which not only created strong institutional bonds and co-operation with Western universities but yielded concrete dividends for her students and their research, through exchange programmes, international workshops and the like. Finally, she was a strong pillar in the construction of the European Association for Urban History. When she joined the committee in 1991, it was still an embryonic body with few activities; by the time she retired in 2004, its conferences were attracting many hundreds of researchers, often young scholars, from across Europe and beyond. Vera Bácskai was not the only eminent Hungarian historian contributing to European scientific co-operation in the 1990s and after. György Granasztói with his atelier of postgraduate researchers and his connections with the Maison des Sciences de l'Homme in Paris was also influential. But in European urban history, Vera Bácskai achieved a distinctive importance.

How does one explain her success? Three points come to mind. First, she was very astute at recognizing and seizing the new opportunities for European co-operation after the end of Soviet oppression. Secondly, she was a serious person, determined in pursuing what she regarded as important. She inspired confidence. The last time I met her face to face was in 2007 when I travelled to Budapest on behalf of the international committee of the EAUH to ask her advice on a new Hungarian member of the committee. Needless to say, she gave wise counsel. Thirdly, and quintessentially, she took the time to establish not just academic but personal friendships. Like many others, I found her warm, calm and charming – maybe it also helped that Vera and I were both inveterate swimmers. One last remark. The life and legacy of Vera Bácskai reminds us that distinguished and energetic scholars like her can make all the difference, having a lasting impact not only in promoting teaching and scientific advance, but also in developing multi-generational friendships, co-operation, and solidarity across Europe, so vital for the future of European urban history.