Hungarian Couple Thought to Have Gone Down with the Titanic Remembered

Hungary Today 2024.04.02.

The names of Zoltán Weress and Irma Baghy appear on an ivy-lined tombstone in the Roman Catholic Cemetery in Szolnok (central Hungary). The couple is remembered for allegedly surviving the world’s most famous ship disaster, the sinking of the Titanic, in 1912.

The Cibakháza (central Hungary, near Szolnok) couple were long thought to have survived the Titanic disaster in April 1912, reports Magyar Nemzet based on the Jász-Nagykun-Szolnok county news site.

For decades, it was believed that the couple had escaped from perhaps the world’s most famous ocean liner when it crashed into an iceberg in the mid-Atlantic on a moonless, pitch-black night. Despite the fact that the hull was divided into watertight compartments and considered extremely safe, RMS Titanic sank into the Atlantic Ocean in 2 hours and 40 minutes, dragging 1,500 of the 2,200 people on board with her to their deaths. Due to the lack of sufficient lifeboats, only 700 people survived the tragedy.

Kitti Sárai, a former journalist of the Cibaki Hírek Online, sought to find out whether Zoltán Weress and Irma Baghy Baghy were in fact on board the ship on the fateful night. During her research, she found personal letters that showed the Weresses were not on the Titanic, which sank in 1912.

However, they survived a major disaster, as in the 1930s, they were passengers on the MV Monte Cervantes, which was eventually named the “Titanic of the South.“

MV Monte Cervantes. Photo via Wikipedia

That ocean liner crashed into a rock, and although this happened far from where the Titanic sank, the similarities between the two events were still strong.

Fact

There were some similarities between the two ships as well, for instance, the passenger capacity was almost the same: 2,492 for the MV Monte Cervantes and 2,453 for the RMS Titanic. However, the Titanic was much larger, at 269.1 meters long, while the “Titanic of the South” was only 152.50 meters long.

Although a few years ago the tomb of the Weress couple seemed to be untended, today, visitors to the cemetery in Szolnok see a very different picture. A tidy environment welcomes all those who stop to pay their respects at the final resting place of the Cibakháza couple.

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Via Magyar Nemzet; Featured image via Wikipedia

Hungarian Couple Thought to Have Gone Down with the Titanic Remembered

However, they survived a major disaster, as in the 1930s, they were passengers on the MV Monte Cervantes, which was eventually named the “Titanic of the South.“

Fact