Sára Timár
History became dear to me from the time I entered high school. I never appreciated it enough before that, because the elementary school teacher made it boring. Perhaps that’s why I “struggled” through every one of those lessons.
Until high school. Now, I’m an advanced level history student because my current teacher made me think of our history in a different way. I attended every lesson and studied every topic we had. I could picture the stories.
One day, it wasn’t even long ago, I asked myself: what are the things from these stories that actually happened in this world? I always feel like we learn something new every day about our past but never really consider it true. Maybe it wasn’t really appropriate to think of them as tales? Or maybe it was, just sometimes people think behind the tales.
I’ve seen the pictures in my book about historical characters and wondered if they really looked like this in real life, and if they did, what would it feel like to meet them physically and not just “mentally” in our imagination. I looked to the front in my class and tried to picture Napoleon standing and staring at us. Is it intimidating or is it exciting? But still, I could only imagine him as represented in the book. Maybe he was short, shorter than any of us, because let’s be real, he lived a while ago. What were personalities like in the past? Everyone knows that today’s celebrities have a private life and they’re normal human beings too. So how could we imagine the personalities of the monarchs in the past? They weren’t only characters as in history, they were people in real life.
For me, sometimes it doesn’t feel like we’re on the same Earth as them, or that we partially live the same life as them in general. I know a lot has changed in the centuries and so the world has changed too, but still, it feels so unreal that it’s still the same world.