The end of a legend
The engine is not purring, it's roaring with a vengeance. You could hear from a kilometer how it's shredding the air to pieces, how it's shaking, choking, clanking, and intimidating the pesky seasons with windows nailed to the ironwork, and a ceiling porous like Swiss cheese. The doors shut with the sound of thunder, the rubber compartment joining the front and back section of the vehicle (called the "accordion") stretches to impossible extremes, cracks appearing between its folds, and patches of sky coming in. But so what? Who hasn't opened their umbrella while riding the famous, the legendary Ikarus bus? Who hasn't puffed and poured rivers of sweat alongside the driver in a desperate attempt to help him change a flat tire on a scorching day? Oh, those enormous, gargantuan, heavy tires!
"Ugh, how much I miss the Red Dragon! Every kilometer you rode on that beast was a story worth a whole thriller novel...", someone muses at a Facebook group dedicated to the mythological old bus with the enigmatic name, "Ikarus". It was part of our world in commie times, it was one of its symbols. And it remained with us for a long time after the "explosion" of democracy over here on the Balkans.
But times are a'changing. The last remaining specimens of this lovely monster are going into history now. The new EU regulations say we should abandon these outdated transit vehicles, and stubstitute them with new ones. The German MAN buses are invading, and taking the sceptre away from the Hungarian dinosaur. But in the meantime, the old nostalgic pictures and stories are piling over in pages, online fanclubs and albums, with captions like, "Ah, those were the days... These beasts have grown old along with us, but somewhere, probably, they'll keep serving faithfully as they always have... The new ones are too slow, too sterile, too ordinary - once the Red Dragon gained speed, there was no stopping. It could miss 2 or 3 bus stops before it finally halted. Oldies but goldies!"
The Ikarus was not just a bus. It was an epoch. The stories and memories related to the Hungarian hero of the 70s and 80s, both amusing in a very Balkan way and absurd (twice as much), have multiplied after the transport authorities decided to send them into retirement, and the last 18-20 specimens of this brand will now be grounded by the end of June. This veteran that has roared along the streets for the last 40 years is going out on a deserved rest.
There are groups similar to the trainspotting maniacs who are instead obsessed with old buses, particularly the Ikarus. They'd spend hours upon hours browsing the city on the bus lines, still using these old monsters. Photocam in hand, they chase them to their garages and all across town to snatch a last shot of what they consider to be not just a bus but the representative of a whole era. "It was unique for its time - such a simple make, simple mechanics, such agility for its size, it could beat even some of its modern counterparts", one of these guys explains in the forums. "Well, they might've grown a bit old over the years, but we still love'm. This place won't be the same without them. Did I also mention there were trolleybuses of that sort, too?"
Some of the wealthier among those Ikarus-fans have even proposed that the Sofia municipality should transform one of its old tram depots into a museum of public transport. The initiative would include buses, trolleybuses and trams, like our very own local Chavdar brand, and more. Some of them really very old.
As strange as that may sound, most of these guys aren't even as old as those buses, but they could often hear their actual former drivers say words of praise. It's all about the nostalgy for the days of childhood past, and attention to the small things in life. None of the new vehicles are likely to cause that sort of sentiment any time soon, I'd wager. Not to mention that some of the most fundamental movies for our domestic cinema often employed such buses, some of the most remarkable scenes there happened in or around the Iracus, so it's far from being just a vehicle. It has capsulated the spirit of a time that many associate with innocent, tranquil timelessness.
The stories of those times abound. One sticked out for me as I was reading those forum pages. One guy named Krassen recalled of the old roaring buses: "Sometime in the 90, my mom and I were coming back to town from grandpa's village, riding the Chavdar bus. Suddenly, a torrent came down the mountain, and we all spread our umbrellas while seated,as the water started pouring through the holes in the old vehicle. After a few stops, we had to be transferred to a newer, more luxurious Ikarus. Why luxurious, you ask? Because I was little back then, and that's how I remember it - it had fewer holes in it, so it must have been luxurious!" The same Krassen is now chasing the last two-piece Ikarus with a photocam in hand all across town, taking pics wherever he could spot it. "Now we're planning to buy that one and turn it into some kind of mini-museum, which we'll use as a tourist attraction in our neighborhood. Better this way than seeing it go to the scrapheap".
This guy is like a walking encyclopedia about the Ikarus. A businessman with a big background, one'd never guess what kind of grown-up kid lurks beneath that sophisticated outlook. But it all becomes transparently clear as soon as he opens his mouth and starts lecturing on the history of the Hungarian brand from commie times of old.
The first two-piece Ikarus 180 arrived here in the 60s. The Sofia municipality bought about 100 of these marvels to serve the new route connecting the freshly built Students Town to the center. They were blue, had two doors in each compartment, and were considered quite luxurious for the standards of the Eastern bloc. The two following decades are considered the golden age of the Ikarus, because these buses were dominant in various corners of the world, from China to Egypt to Libya, Iraq, Angola, and particularly Mozambique and Tanzania. The entire socialist camp considered them an integral part of technological progress, and they could be seen on postcards and other propaganda items that were designed to boast about how good we were at everything. Similar vehicles were being produced in Cuba, North Korea and Iran at the time, using the Ikarus know-how. In 1977 (a year before I was born), the new model arrived, Ikarus 286, already designed for the US and Canadian market. Its maker Laszlo Finta made a revolution in that field, and with him an exponential development of the brand started.
Still, the prevalent model around these latitudes remains the Ikarus 280, the Red Beast with the distinct black stripes and white doors, which was launched in 1973 and was produced well into the 90s with almost no alterations. Both the manual and automatic gear version remained basically intact for decades. It had 180 standing and 37 sitting places. The various modifications could have 33 or 40 seats, and some inter-city versions could reach 58. It was called the "Eternal machine" or Perpetuum-mobile, because there was virtually nothing in it that could be broken. You just press a button and a pneumatically driven door opens. No particularly sophisticated electronics, everything is mechanics. If in some rare occasion something does break, you just get down with a wrench and a turnscrew and you fix it in a minute. The controls were quite intuitive, even a first-grader could sit and drive (indeed, there were cases of school pupils stealing buses and making pranks with them). Drivers had some special personal connection with this vehicle, you'd often see them decorating it with all sorts of weird stuff, putting plates with their names on the front; they'd look after it as if it were their baby. My fave piece of decoration was a dice-shaped gear stick. Or the beagle-puppy doll with the rocking head that always adorned the wind-shield. My bro has such a dog now, and people still stop him on the street and say, "Hey, the puppy from the bus!" :-)
Toward the late 80s, the last Ikarus deliveries came to BG, and the next decade was rather difficult for this legend of old, the mother company changing hands several times. In 1999 it was bought by Irisbus, whose management severely cut the production rates, and eventually halted it by 2007. Three years later, 18 Hungarian bus producers started a rescue operation and bought the brand's shares, and then launched the new models V134, V187, E127 and E134. These could still be seen around the streets of Budapest today.
Although most people who remember those times would attest that the first thing that comes to mind when hearing the name Ikarus is the motto "Sutriness in summer and frost in winter", and agree that this machine is "a dirty, noisy, dusty anachronism", people like Krassen and his fellow fans will keep working hard to preserve the legend, if only through building miniature replicas of the beast, or keeping the last remaining specimens in museums. As cranky, flaw-plagued jalopies as they might've been, they've been part of our world of generations. And some, like Krassen, would still think twice before boarding the next MAN that arrives at their bus stop, and would rather wait for the Ikarus.
Ps. The first Ikarus to come to the US was a cousin of the famous Ikarus 280. It was produced between 1978 and 1986 in a joint venture between the mother company and Crown Coach Corporation. In the beginning, all US-bound models were to be assembled in Budapest and Sekesfehervar, but from the 80s onwards, they were already being produced in California. Ikaruses have roamed the streets of Portland OR, Louisville, Milwaukee, and even New York and Honolulu. After the end of the golden era of the Ikarus, the deliveries to the US ceased, but in the 90s the North American Bus Industries revived the legend. Today, state of the art buses are coming out of the factory by the old scheme: the main body comes from Budapest, and the rest is being assembled in California.