Well Budapest, what can I say? What a wonderful place. You are now my official favourite city. Take an insomnia pill New York. Wipe that sanctimonious smirk off your face Paris. Turn off that phone Hong Kong. There’s a new kid in town.
Vienna was inspiring with its beautiful palaces and it’s magical, musical past. But it’s flat and organised. A touch of dishevelment and hints of a more “colourful” past plus a few hills make for greater interest. Vienna certainly has interesting history being front and centre with Budapest in the Austro-Hungarian Empire followed not long after by it’s capitulation to nazism. And it’s suburbs are as graffitied as any other city. But Budapest is coming out of something no city, no country, no people should be made to suffer and the transition is incomplete but the potential is obvious. Maybe the same can be said for Bucharest and Sofia and any number of places which experienced the same cold, dead-hand of totalitarianism, but today we are focussing on Budapest.
Budapest has the Danube. Many places have the Danube as it’s Europe’s second longest river behind the Volga which is entirely in Russia so doesn’t really count. And the best place to showcase a city from, in my humble opinion, is a river and if that river happens to be the Danube then all the better. Many of Budapest’s most outstanding landmarks are visible in all of their glory from the river. And there are plenty of them which you can read about in any number of books and blogs, but not this one.
Our tour guide advised us that the happiest day in Budapest’s long history (they celebrated 1000 years in 1896) was the day in 1991 when the Soviet army left. Then the hard work began because what hadn’t been trashed had been neglected to a criminal extent. Restoration work is proceeding apace but unfortunately the economy hasn’t progressed since the communists were kicked out, to the extent that sufficient funds are available to restore everything. So you get this strange phenomenon of a street of beautifully restored palaces and five story town houses interspersed with potentially and previously beautiful buildings sporting crumbling masonry, exposed bricks and collapsing facades. And they are filthy.
Now, the majority of restoration work is done as a condition of sale of the particular building. So if a hotel chain or a bank or any other business buys a run-down building, they are required to do the restoration themselves, in some cases it would appear, simply to make them habitable. How’s that, you millennial, socialist weenies? Capitalism is cleaning up the mess your communist fellow-travellers left when they scuttled back to their mythical land of fairness and equality where everyone lives happily ever after.
Meanwhile back in the real world you can still see bullet holes from World War 2 and more recently from the uprising of 1956 when the plucky Magyars tried to toss out the Soviets only to be crushed. A small part of this was reenacted in the pool at the Melbourne Olympics when Hungary played the Soviet Union in water polo – the “Blood in the Water” match won by Hungary 4-0.
These are the reasons why Budapest is such a wonderful place. It has a magnificent smorgasbord of attractions, it has reminders of its tragic past and it is demonstrating its determination to eradicate, but not forget that past.