What does eight hundred years mean? Numbers and letters written side by side on a piece of paper. We now know that deep time, describing the time spans of the Earth’s history, is something our brains cannot grasp. Even the time span of the Pannonhalma Basilica, which is eight hundred years old this year, is beyond the scale of human life. For most people, the year 1224 is little more than a vague memory of a history lesson.

What we are attempting to do is to put the Basilica’s 800-year time span into perspective through the faces and stories of eight 100-year-old people. We are building a bridge to the incomprehensible.

 

Our subjects, who have lived through a whole century, are explicitly elderly people, born between the two world wars and having lived through the Second World War as young adults. It takes eight of their long life stories, one after the other, to bring us back in imagination to where the Basilica began.

Let us try to step out of our own limitations and look at our own age, our own lives, from this perspective that spans the centuries. This will help us to get our bearings - it will help us to judge what is important, what is meaningful, what is lasting.