Whistles

I think I've mentioned  before that I'm involved in Hungarian scouting.  Which means that while I am a scout leader, I do my scouting in Hungarian.  In Canada, or in the northern US, as the case may be.  Which is confusing at the best of times (I usually end up giving US Customs a history lecture, when I try to explain how I, a Canadian, am heading to the States, to do scouting.  In Hungarian.  A friend of mine has advised me "don't call it 'Scouts', it just confuses the hell out of everybody; call it a 'diaspora youth group.' Makes more sense.")

Now that I've gotten that out of the way, every year, at the end of September, there's a camp whose theme changes every year, but always has something to do with Hungarian folk culture.  Last year, the theme was the Csángó of Moldavia, a Hungarian population that has lived in isolation from the remainder of Hungarians for a few centuries now, to the point that among other things, their dance styles hadn't evolved with time ("old-style" group dances, as opposed to "new-style" couples' dances; because, hey, who doesn't like dancing?).

I was contacted by a friend who was one of the organizers for this camp, and she asked me to design the camp souvenir.  We have little souvenirs we can hang from our neckerchief woggles, and some scouts' woggles become so decorated with souvenirs, aide-mémoires of various sorts, etc., that they're referred to as "Christmas trees".  Anyway, she had an idea she wanted me to do--a souvenir based on a traditional type of flute, called a 'kaval'.  A kaval is a flute that is open at both ends, is end blown, and in Csángó folk music, is hummed into, as it is blown, creating a sort of drone, along with the flute's 'whistle'.

That was all I had to work with, really:  "make it so it looks like a kaval."  Everything else was up to me.  Unfortunately, I didn't have time that week to work on the design, but I had an idea of how I wanted it to come together, how it would look.  My original prototype had a mocked, black-markered mouthpiece at one end, and only five holes.  The final result was more like a real kaval, with "holes" at both ends, and six "holes" for melodies (all drawn, of course; they would have been much more authentic, but much too fragile had I attempted to actually make real holes...).

I had to make about forty or so of these souvenirs, which took me nearly the entirety of the first day of camp.  Dowel rods had to be cut, coloured, and lanyard holes drilled, before I could scribe them.  That was the hard part:  not only having to use a pen-nib on a rounded surface, but wood, at that!  Every once in a while, whether it be from the nib being too full of ink, or whether the wood grain happened to be more absorbent at spots, some of the letters were more, well, blobs, than actual letters.  I decided to go with an Uncial script, for no other reason than it felt right.  And it would be easier to write on a rounded wood surface, than, say, Gothic.  I was also afforded one or two creative touches in the lettering:  the Hungarian alphabet has letters with umlauts ( ö, ü) and "long marks" (ő, ű), and these go over the letters.  However, due to the constraints I had to deal with, I chose to tuck the umlauts of the letter 'Ö' inside.  Thankfully, the word is still readable as "REGÖS", despite the unusual umlaut placement.  Furthermore, instead of writing "REGÖS 2012", I decided to write the year a bit more subtly, and tucked "12" inside the bowl of the letter 'G'.  I doubt there will be confusion as to whether it was Regös 1912, 2012, or 2112.

The souvenirs were very well received.  So well received, in fact, I was asked to do the souvenirs again for this year's camp.  Which, apparently, were very well received.  I think I just excelled myself into a job I can't get out of.