They were three to four (or two to three) hundred years old at their time of death and found eight million years later in an open-pit lignite mine near the town of Bükkábrány. Transported to the Ottó Herman Museum four of the sixteen now live there, preserved in tanks and asked to linger on. These cypress trees somehow still living, heavy death in murky waters.
Magali takes a photo of the tree through the viewing window of the large steel tank. She looks at the camera, reviewing the photo that has just been taken. Perplexed, she takes another photo and another. “It’s so weird: all I can see is a face. That’s creepy,” she says.
I point to an illustration of a boar on the wall behind her. The drawn animal’s head is identical to the face in the photo.