Train whistles from the station. The house of eternal holidays, the refuge of timelessness.
Our house in Balatonlelle was built in 1927, on a plot of land purchased by my great-grandparents in 1905. Different generations of my family have spent entire summers here—and even endured the Second World War in this place.
The wild landscape has been replaced by subdivided plots, the small path by a concrete street, the little bay disappeared. Everything has changed, and yet everything remains the same. My sister and I, my mother and her sister, my grandmother and her sister, my great-grandmother and her sister. Mothers, daughters, grandmothers, sisters. Lake Balaton, our common mother, a matriarch.

A family bond. A long thread, a bubble swelling until it bursts.
Like the sac inside a mother’s womb, breaking before the amniotic fluid flows out—just as warm as the waters of Lake Balaton on an August day. This house is my bubble. Here time flows differently, a garden where ancient trees tell stories, a lake whose water holds magical powers, a place where past merges together with the present.

The photographs from my family archive, like the missing pieces of a mystery, weave the present into the past. Just like the “golden bridge of Lake Balaton”—that beam of light that appears on the water’s surface at every sunset—I search for a passage between past and present. I imagine this bridge opening a path to my ancestors. Recurring yet unique, eternal yet ever-changing. Just like a fairy tale—yet true.