So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish Last week my good friend Levente Nagy passed away in Lugano, Switzerland. I met him in the 80s in Transilvania, Romania, when he picked up a Swiss hitchhiker on a shoestring in his Dacia car. He invited me to stay at his apartment for a few days. This was an incredible risk for Levente during the rule of Ceauşescu, which I only realized later on. He took me along to meetups with his intellectual friends, where we had deep conversations about arts, totalitarian regimes, and more. Almost all in his friend circle escaped to the West because arts and education was suppressed. As a professor at the Higher Institute of Fine Arts in Cluj he was recruited to work as a spy in the West. He defected, and asked for asylum in Switzerland. We kept touch when he lived in Switzerland, and later on in Italy and Hungary. We wen to to visit him in Italy in 2017, where he showed us around in Lombardia. I took this portrait of Levente when we went to see Chiostro della Chiesa di S. Michele a Voltorre, a monastery turned museum near Varese. In the past he helped organize art exhibitions at that museum. He had a colorful life, traveling all over Europe to assess the authenticity of old paintings. I'll miss you Levente! -- ƒ/5.6, 12 mm, 1/13 sec, ISO 200, Sony A7 II, Rokinon 12mm F2.8, HDR, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, © 2025 Peter Thoeny, @Quality HDR Photography

So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

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-- CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, © 2025 Peter Thoeny, QualityHDR.com

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