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Hungary pangs
Visitors to Memento Park on the outskirts of Budapest are entitled to one free “commie” gift, as long as they have the voucher from the City’s hop-on-hop-off bus. We did, and we got the gifts, for Marty a small sized “Three Terrors” (Lenin, Stalin and Mao) T-shirt, a takeoff of the three tenors, on the back of which are tour dates listing their various places of conquest, and for Kaelene a CD or DVD, we haven’t yet worked out which or of what.
Someone it seems had the good sense to save a number of statues and monuments at a time during the 1990s when many of the symbols of Eastern Bloc communism were destroyed in a fit of liberation or to expunge the recent political past. At Memento Park are displayed, not only a decrepit version of the Trabant car, but also some pretty impressive works; a monument representing Stalin’s boots, a cubist statue depicting Marx and Engels which was originally positioned in front of the Communist Party Headquarters in Budapest, a six metre tall statue of a soviet soldier carrying hammer and sickle in one hand and with a cartridge disc pistol hanging from his neck, and Lenin with outstretched hand, this statue originally ordered by Soviet party secretary, Nikita Khrustchev. It was an impressive line-up, but treated with some degree of disrespect. “The way it was, Comrade,” the advertising leaflet reads. “Go back to the good old days when Hungarians drove Tabants, lived in Block flats, stood in banana lines, had two passports, coupon books, no TV on Mondays and no freedom of speech!”. Another: “Mammoth communist statues are presented in a stark and powerful manner to really drive home the horror and brutality of the period”. Really?
We did not have any idea of what to expect in Hungary. We were persuaded to visit by the Moodie’s current child career, Andrea, who hails from somewhere in the West of the country and insisted on its beauty, inexpensive cost of living and party scene. So off we went confidently armed with a downloaded SatNav map of Central and Eastern Europe.
We discussed our perceptions of Eastern Bloc countries and they were predominately stark and bleak, of a grey landscape with dull people. So Budapest was a surprise. To start with it is hot and sunny, 35 degrees the day we arrived and expected to reach 40 later in the week. The sky was clear and blue and the people friendly and service excellent. They are champions of culture, although composer Strauss must have been blinded by lust when he described the Danube being as blue, it is as brown and muddy as any other flat-land river. For the contemporary music fans there are festivals galore and bollards with posters advertising impending concerts by BB King and Leonard Cohen. We just missed both as we will the Formula One Hungarian Grand Prix, on here the weekend after we leave.
It could be that proper tourists take weeks to discover a city like this, but for us it was a reversion to speed tourism. Into town, on the bus and past Parliament, Heroes’ and several other squares, down big tree-lined boulevards, past the old Nazi Party Headquarters (now the House of Terror Museum), other museums and the Opera House, basilicas and the Central Market Hall. We did stop at the Citadel on Gellert Hill with its 1956 Freedom Monument and offering spectacular views out over the city (Buda on one side of the Danube, Pest on the other), and then Castle Hill. This is a remarkable area with the Fishermen’s’ Bastion at one end and Buda Castle the other. The Fishermen’s Bastion is described as a limestone edifice with seven towers representing the seven tribal leaders who conquered Hungary in 896. Although built as a fortress, the description continues that, despite its immense beauty, militarily speaking, it is pretty useless.
From Castle Hill it was down the funicular and across the bridge to pick up our car. Budapest is done, it is now on to Lake Balaton and then to Croatia.