Fekete gyémántok

Summary

Lightning cleaves a midnight vein of velvet sky above 19th-century Fót, hurling a single black diamond into the mud where fate’s fingerprints already smear the land. The stone—luciferous yet cursed—spirals through dynastic treachery, Jewish merchant sagacity, serf rebellion and Habsburg roulette, ricocheting from the calloused palm of salt-miner János to the perfumed gloves of Countess Eveline before lodging in the conscience of urbane geologist Zoltán, whose microscope can’t magnify the gem’s moral fracture. Jókai’s baroque plotting becomes celluloid mercury: a moonlit sleigh chase across the Tisza’s cracking ice, a cathedral crypt echoing with forged promissory notes, a candlelit duel where blades whisper anti-Semitic slurs while revolutionaries sing Kossuth in the tavern upstairs. Somlay’s tormented count, Isa Marsen’s mercurial heiress and Jenö Balassa’s Byronic smuggler intertwine like poisoned ivy around the diamond’s adamantine glare, each facet reflecting a Hungary caught between feudal languor and capitalist vertigo. When the gem finally fractures, the splinters pierce not only retinas but the very lens of history, exposing how wealth calcifies conscience and nationalism can be auctioned to the highest bidder.

Synopsis