Hungary has been celebrating a famous fictional son for the past decade, writes Bridget Hourican

The world's most unusual Bloomsday - that we've heard of - takes place in Szombathely, western Hungary, on the border with Austria. The festival is a decade old this year. Like Dublin's Bloomsday, it was started by a small group of scholars and artists who met informally to revive over drinks the anarchic spirit of Joyce; 10 years on and sponsors include the city council and the Irish Embassy in Budapest, and the whole town (population 80,000) is expected to attend.

But why Szombathely? Pronounced "Som-bah-thai" and meaning "Saturday place", it's a quintessentially Austro-Hungarian town: broad streets, pastry shops and pastel-coloured neo-classical buildings. Austrians slip over the border for cheap shopping.

Joyce never stayed here and it seems an unlikely setting for Bloomsday. But read Ulysses, and in the Ithaca episode, Joyce gives Leopold Bloom's ancestry as "Bloom, only born male transubstantial heir of Rudolf Virag (subsequently Rudolph Bloom) of Szombathely . . ." There are three other references to Szombathely, including: "Jasperstone begat Vingtetunieme and Vingtetunieme begat Szombathely and Szombathely begat Virag and Virag begat Bloom et vocabitur nomen eius Emmanuel."

Virag means flower in Hungarian, hence Bloom, but it's a conceit of Joyce's that Leopold's father began life as Rudolf Virag. There were Jews in Szombathely called Blum, but never Virag. Laszlo Najmanyi, writer, musician and organiser of the Hungarian Bloomsday, says: "The Blums were big textile traders in Szombathely and members of the family were posted in Trieste. It's likely that Joyce met them there." Trieste was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire and Joyce certainly met Hungarians, including Teodoro Mayer, owner of Irredentist newspapers, and one of the models for Bloom. A motif in Ulysses is Arthur Griffith's Resurrection of Hungary - the history of the struggle for independence from Austria, presented as a model for the Irish. The United Irishman serialised the book from January to June 1904, so of course characters in Ulysses are busy reading it.

Bits of Hungarian find their way into the melting pot of Ulysses, viz. Százharminczbrojúgulyás-Dugulás, which means: "Onehundredandthirty-calf-shepherd-stopping up". Good to know that. (It rhymes in Hungarian). As the most labyrinthine, difficult language in Europe, it obviously appealed to Joyce, because he put swathes of Finnegans Wake into Hungarian.

Today, there are few Jews left in Szombathely. But Hungarian historian Robert Orban has traced the house once occupied by the Blum textilers. It's on the main square and now has a plaque proudly proclaiming it as the birthplace of Bloom's father.

On Bloomsday, the mayor of Szombathely, Dr Gyorgy Ipkovich, and the Irish Ambassador to Hungary, Brendan McMahon, are to unveil a statue of Joyce that will "step out" of the wall of the Blum house. Sculpted by Gabor Veres, it's Hungary's first Joyce statue.

"Bloomsday in Szombathely is one of the major cultural events we support in Hungary," says McMahon. He organised the Callino Quartet from Ireland to open the festival last Thursday, with music from Turlough O'Carolan, Thomas Moore, Kodály and others, and readings from Swift, Moore, Yeats, Joyce and Heaney.

Other events are less conventional and include an "imaginary art exhibition" called The Real Bloom, and a club night called "BloomBusted". Najmanyi also intended the festival to launch his play, which lasts 17 hours and 20 minutes and was to be performed over six days in the main square. It's based on an imaginary visit by the Joyce family to Szombathely and seems highly surreal. Characters include the Irish ambassador, Samuel Beckett, the High Priestess Isis and the High Priest Osiris. At one point the audience is served "boiled potatoes on rose petals and authentic Dublin rainwater to drink".

However, just recently, the city council pulled all but a few hours of the play. Najmanyi is despondent and muttering about Stalinism and some things never changing. I'm sympathetic (what about the actors?) but I'm not surprised. City councils aren't the most adventurous and, after all, they're already promoting one 20-hour narrative of Augean complexity.