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Budapest has been on our “to visit” list for a long time and we weren’t disappointed. It’s a clean, green city with characterful buildings down every street and some truly great ones like the Parliament buildings, and St Stephen’s Basilica with the most astonishing interior of any church we’ve ever seen.
The twin city Buda and Pest has an excellent, unified public transport system that we must have nearly bankrupted with our extensive use of the 7-day Transport Card we bought soon after our hydrofoil docked just downstream from Parliament. Our journey down the Danube from Vienna, with an overnight stop in Bratislava, the small capital city of Slovakia, was much less grand than those of the big river cruise boats that ply these waters, but it had the advantage of speed.
From our apartment in Erzsebet Street in central Pest we took the modern trams and underground to see the sights of the city, including Buda Castle with its panoramic views from Fisherman’s Bastion. We returned to the Castle in the evening to attend a classical music performance at St Matthias, after enjoying so much the one we’d attended the previous night at St Michael’s across the river in Pest. And for something different we saw Giselle at the Hungarian State Opera House on Saturday night.
Hungary suffered badly from the two 20th century World Wars and the decades-long Soviet occupation that ended only relatively recently. Now Hungarians are free to tell their story and some of the tragedy is chronicled at the atmospheric Terra Haza (Terror House), the former headquarters of the Nazi, and later the Communist, secret police, and now a memorial to the hundreds of thousands of victims of the Nazi and Soviet dictatorships. It’s an excellent museum with many relics and sounds of the eras setting the scene. Our visit over, we adjourned to a nearby pub and ordered hamburgers for lunch – they were so awful they would surely have shocked the sensibilities of even the most hardened Cold War apologist.
On a related theme to Terror House, Memento Park in the Buda Hills on the edge of the city was established to display the large but silly statues removed from the streets of Budapest following the collapse of the Soviet Union. A display in the nearby barracks tells the story of the 1956 Hungarian Uprising and screens a video containing actual excerpts from Secret Police training films of the era that would be comedic had their implications not been so tragic. Segments include “Where to plant the bug?” and “Introduction to Raiding a House”. We had to cut short our walk past all the statues when a lightning storm blew in from nowhere – I didn’t fancy standing at the base of large structures with so much high voltage electricity crackling about, and I certainly wasn’t going to let Lenin have the Last Laugh.
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