The World War I Memorial Path in Eger

Architect: Dénes Fajcsák
Graphics: Aliz Borsa
Text: Levente Szabó
Photos: Aliz Borsa, Márk Huszár, Róbert Nemes

The Eger Norma Foundation has initiated the erection of a memorial to commemorate 318 soldiers who died in Eger during World War I. This work by a duo of designers, architect Dénes Fajcsák and graphic designer Aliz Borsa led to a great result on a generous scale. The project carried out here was as much a matter of rejecting cliché ideas as of avoiding urban spaces overloaded with monuments as choosing the 316-metre-long boomerang-shaped site of the Eger stream and designing the typographic cloud of the names of the military victims painted on the stonework of the bank, including the tiniest detail. The route of the promenade along the bank of the stream is a path along which we can see the other side of the stream bed and look at the light yellow letters, the names of the victims individually hand-painted along the bank, which have been placed there not following the order of the stone wall, but almost randomly to create a new contemporary layer. This is a bold and fresh intervention on the scale of land art, in which a random intricate web of names, resembling the stream below, runs along this vast stretch of shore, offering a different perspective to the passerby changing at each point: a name is as legible as the curve of the road, which makes up the vibrant composition of the cloud of names visible in context.

Client: István Herman – Egri Norma Foundation
Designers: Dénes Fajcsák, Aliz Borsa
Consultant: Ákos Polgárdi
Fellow designer: Péter Juhász
Contractor: Vertigo Murals