The statue, which Kassa's Hungarian Community House erected in December 2004 with donations as well as support from Slovakian Ministry of Culture and Hungary's National Culture Fund, has been subject to occasional attacks by vandals.
Márai was born in Kassa in 1900, when the city was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He rose to fame as one of the leading literary novelists in Hungary in the 1930s. Profoundly anti-fascist, he survived the Second World War, but persecution by the Communists drove him away from the country in 1948, first to Italy and then to the United States. Márai committed suicide in San Diego in 1989, never knowing about the fall of the Berlin Wall and the restoration of democracy to Central Europe. He is the author of over twenty books. "Embers" was the first to be translated into English.
Source: Hungarian News Agency (MTI) / Penguin Books
