John Lennon Bust in Sopron, Hungary

Sopron's John Lennon memorial is a copper bust, not a full statue. It stands in the courtyard of the Horváth József music school at Szélmalom utca 17, in the town in western Hungary. Budapest sculptor László Szlávics Jr. donated it for Lennon's 70th birthday, and it was unveiled on 2 October 2010.

A Budapest medallist's copper portraits

László Szlávics Jr., born in Budapest in 1959, is best known as a sculptor of medals. Since the late 1980s he has also hammered portrait busts out of copper sheet, mostly of Hungarian historical figures, and most of them stand in schools named after their subjects: Zrínyi, Görgei, Tornyai, Széchenyi. Those busts are one and a half times life size. His Lennon is life size.

He first made a portrait of Lennon in 1988 and reworked it into the present bust in 2009. It measures 77 by 35 by 26 centimetres and sits on a limestone column 170 centimetres tall. Szlávics already had ties to Sopron. He showed his work in two solo exhibitions in the town in 2009, at the Körmendi Galéria and in the Lábasház of the Soproni Múzeum, and that year he gave the music school a Liszt bust he had made in 1989.

The unveiling on 2 October 2010

The director, Stöckertné Lampert Tünde, told the regional daily Kisalföld that the school, which then taught 630 pupils, saw Lennon and the Beatles as symbols of youth. So it chose World Music Day 2010 to mark what would have been Lennon's 70th birthday and the 30th anniversary of his death. László Sass, who chaired the town's culture and education committee, did much of the work of getting the bust set up, according to the town's own report.

The ceremony began at 10:00 on Saturday 2 October 2010. Deputy mayor Dr István Simon welcomed the guests and said Sopron had always been at the front of European civic thinking. The memorial speech came from József Oravecz, a musician who had left the profession. Teachers from the school, the Liszt Ferenc teachers' choir and the H2O Acoustic Rock Band performed, and the programme listed "Come Together" for the audience to sing.

Kisalföld's preview put the bust in a short national history. Until then the only Lennon memorial in Hungary was the 1986 column at Kazincbarcika, raised by a teacher and his pupils, which made Sopron's the country's first public bust of Lennon.

A Jesuit college turned music school

The Horváth József school descends from the Sopron Music Society, founded in 1829. Its classes were the first of their kind in present-day Hungary. Since 2004 it has occupied a building on Szélmalom utca that the Jesuits opened in 1661, near the Vienna Gate, as a boarding college for the sons of noble families. After the fire of 1676 the order moved into the town centre, and the building spent centuries as a granary, stable and warehouse. It was restored between 2001 and 2003 and a modern wing was added.

Published accounts give no visiting rules for the courtyard of this working school, and the latest description of the bust in place is a Köztérkép entry from December 2020. A local paper's 2010 headline said the bust had been put "on the wall" of the school. The bust stands on its own limestone column in the courtyard; the Köztérkép description places it close to the Szélmalom utca entrance, against the wall of the right-hand wing.