... the newspaper wrote about me!
interview with Tamás Szűcs (tompens owner)

For almost three years after the first invitation, I wondered whether I should give an interview to the press about what I do. At about the same time, I was approached by two newspapers, one left-wing liberal paper and one pro-government newspaper.  My eventual choice was more of a statement: I said yes to a newspaper that is not published in Hungary, but in Slovakia, in "neutral" territory. From there it is transported to Hungary every week. They do this because no printing house in Hungary dares to print it. So at least I can say that I am published in the foreign press.  Below you can read the full text from the 24 May (2019/21) issue of Magyar Hang:

The life of Tamás Szűcs deserves a film: as a teenager in Oradea, he tried three times to escape across the communist Romanian-Hungarian border in 1987, and after being caught, he was beaten with rifle butts by Romanian soldiers. Later it emerged that he had been under surveillance by the Securitate since the age of 16, because he had allegedly told someone he was going to shoot Ceausescu, and that the secret service was suspicious that one of his absurd poems was about how he would like to have an ice cream with Ceausescu. Moving to Hungary, he wanted to become a child psychologist, so he did an internship in a foster home for three years, but his experiences there were so harsh that he gave up his dream. He photographed celebrities and then studied aesthetics and communication at the University of Pécs (Hungary). At that time everyone went west, but he went east, teaching children in the easternmost Csángó-Hungarian community in Magyarfalu (Arini - Romania). He worked in an advertising agency, was a journalist, then fell in love with pens after inheriting a number of pens.

He has been repairing pens for over ten years, and his reputation has spread by word of mouth. Of course, there are also many new customers: if someone drops a valuable pen on the floor and gets desperate, they type in pen repair into a search engine and that is how they find him. But don't think he's going to make a fortune from it because, as he says, "there's no hysterical interest in fountain pens".

How did he start repairing pens? Are all writing instruments repairable and worth repairing? Who uses pens? How expensive are the writing instruments that are brought to him? How long does a pen last? And what causes it to deteriorate? Find the answers in the 24 May 2019/21 issue of the Magyar Hang (Hungarian Voice)!
Online version (HU)

Video of my illegal border crossing. (first 13 minutes).