The presentation discusses examples of the Hungarian and Eastern European literary and artistic reception of Psalm 137. The psalm depicts the pain of the Jews suffering in Babylonian captivity, who in their sorrow hung their harps upon the willows. The song about the sadness felt because of exile and the loss of home was later re-interpreted and re-contextualised. The heartbreaking description of the destroyed home of the exiled Jews in János Thordai’s psalm written in the seventeenth century was likely inspired by the grief caused by the destruction of Hungary during the Ottoman rule. The motif of the instruments hung upon the tree, once related to society and nation, was enriched with new, individualistic meanings during the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century. In Mihály Csokonai Vitéz and András Farkas’s poems the figure of the poet becoming silent was used to show the inability of the outside world to understand the poet or his inner artistic crisis. The motif of the instrument hung upon the tree can be found in the poem titled ‘The Three Gypsies’ by the Austrian poet Nikolaus Lenau, who was born in Hungary, and in the artworks based on the poem, for example in the painting by the Austrian artist Aloys Schönn. The topic was probably chosen not only because of ethnographic interest, but also because orientalism in the nineteenth century meant for several Austrian artists the depiction of the life and customs of Hungarian and Transylvanian Roma, who were believed to have originated from the East. In the second half of the century, August Pettenkofen, who had often visited Szolnok with his painter friends, also turned to the ‘exotic’ life of Hungarian peasants, horse herdsmen and nomadic Roma. However, the topic of the ‘three Gypsies must have been even more interesting because of the particular ambivalence between the anecdotal, genre-like scene and the Biblical-philosophical topic.