the Hungarian sabre school and Aladár Gerevich Print, Vintage Scherma Poster, Ungheria Retro Wall Art, Black and White Sports Print

SCIABOLA UNGHERESE — a LostTeams editorial print telling the existing story of Sciabola ungherese, 1928-1964.

Six Olympic Games. Not six appearances. Six gold medals, at six consecutive Olympics, spanning twenty-eight years.

Aladár Gerevich won his first in 1932 and his last in 1960. In between there was a world war that cancelled two Games and very nearly cancelled him. He was fifty years old at the Rome Olympics and the Hungarian federation had decided he was too old to be selected.

The story of what happened next is told the same way by everyone who tells it. He asked to fence the entire national squad, one at a time, and beat all of them. He was selected. Hungary won the team sabre again, as it had at every Olympics since 1928.

The dominance behind him is difficult to overstate. Between 1908 and 1964 the individual Olympic sabre title went to a Hungarian at every Games except the one Hungary was not allowed to enter, in 1920, as a defeated power. The team title was Hungarian seven times in a row. It ended in Tokyo in 1964, when the Soviet Union finally took it.

The strange part is where the school came from. The man who built it was Italian. Italo Santelli moved to Budapest around the turn of the century, taught a lighter, faster, wrist-driven sabre against the heavy cavalry style everyone else used, and produced generations of Hungarians who beat everybody, including Italy.

Gerevich fenced under a monarchy, under a fascist government, under German occupation and under Stalinism, and won for all of them. There is a photograph from 1952 of him standing behind Mátyás Rákosi. He is in the second row, in a suit, looking at nothing in particular.

Not everyone in those teams survived to be photographed. Attila Petschauer had won team sabre gold alongside him in 1928 and 1932. He was Jewish, and in 1943 he died in a forced labour battalion on the eastern front, after being tortured by Hungarian officers.

Gerevich married an Olympic fencing medallist whose father had also been one. Their son won two Olympic bronzes. Four generations of one household with Olympic fencing medals.

Hang it. One day someone will ask you what it is, and you will know where to begin.