Yuli Tsakalou
In her new novel “The cyclist of the Prater”, Eleni Kekropoulou does not hesitate and reconstructs like a puzzle the pieces of a forgotten story that shook the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the 19th century and largely contributed to the collapse of the Habsburg dynasty.
Although the “Maegerling Affair” is well known, and was even made into a very successful film in 1968 starring Omar Sharif and Catherine Deneuve in the respective roles of Maria Vecera and Prince Rudolph, directed and written by Terence Young, it is not it also has a lot to do with the “Cyclist of the Prater”, which is the story from the side of the Baltatzis family.
Because nothing was known until now regarding Maria Vetsera’s family of Greek origin, nor have the Western writers who have dealt with the subject dealt with this side. The rise, activity and fall of the Baltazzi family in Habsburg Vienna, a family that maintained its ties to its Roman past to a very large extent, remained unknown and hushed up.
All the heroes of this story are real, they lived and acted in an exciting as well as politically difficult era marked by the First World War and the collapse of three empires: the Austro-Hungarian, the Ottoman and the Russian.
Through the novel, the author seeks the answers to many questions by following the course of things and clearly unfolding the achievements of the Greek world of the diaspora – beyond the love story that is at the center of it – focusing on important personalities, such as Simon Sinas and his family, who were the magnates of Europe, great benefactors not only for the liberated Greece, but also for Austria-Hungary itself, where they have left a heavy imprint to this day.
Starting point of this book, the Prater Cyclist is revealed to be none other than a Greek woman from the City, Eleni Baltatzi.
The eldest of the daughters of Constantinople’s Theodoros Baltazis, a great banker and advisor to Sultan Abdul Mejit I, was in the 1860s the richest bride of her time.
Her forced marriage to her guardian, Albin Vecera, the Austrian ambassador, will bring her to the Vienna of Johann Strauss and Richard Wagner. There, he will discover a new life, cheerful and open, another world and culture, completely different from those he met in the City where he was born and raised. She will win the title of baroness and live in absolute luxury, a life full of fun and secret loves. She will be considered one of the most elegant Viennese women, following Empress Sissy, and the receptions at her palace will leave an era. Together with her brothers, four very charming men involved in banking and horse racing, will dominate the social life of the Austrian capital.
Mastery of storytelling with a plot of fantasy and reality
The reader will encounter another dimension of things through the lives of the protagonists, a human map in which love, passions, vulnerabilities exist, and indeed in an unstable environment. Hell may be only a short distance from the invoked Heaven, a floor, a block, a few kilometers, who knows! And this glimmering paradise will probably be too late for our beautiful heroine, and she may never know it.
Imagination and reality flirt in this novel, leading to a dangerous game between the mind and the heart, logic and emotion, elements different and out of place, which by the origins of the world are doomed to a conflict where whoever wins cannot no losses. It aims at the essence of things and, above all, at the essence of emotions and the deepest instincts that direct them, leading man either to total elevation or to complete destruction. The psychological profile of the heroes is built with too much detail and their psycho-emotional analysis is worked out in a unique way that troubles us and leads us to a deeper introspection, even of ourselves.
The author tries to explain human emotions, but also to understand the reality of human existence itself, whether it is led to decisions of logic or decisions of the heart.
Eleni Kekropoulou uniquely provides the answers, as she proves once once more that she is a craftsman of speech and language, a master of storytelling who rushes with sharpness towards words and builds stories that fascinate.
A true story
At the end of the book there is photographic material with all the heroes of the novel, and this time Eleni Kekropoulou may not cite a bibliography, as she usually does, but it is more than clear that, in order to write this novel, a great deal of careful research was done, as always.
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