Twenty-Four Photos of Budapest

Every city has a feel. As we stepped from the train station into the gloaming and drizzle of Budapest’s rush hour, I had a sense of heaviness. The buildings are large and a imposing height of 6-8 stories, forming ornate walls that seem to crowd you toward the street. Evan Rail, my travel companion and fellow writer, had been to Budapest many times and he perked up at the sight of those buildings. With a smile that suggested relish, he used a single adjective to describe them: “imperial.” I reflected on that word often over the next six days of my stay.

Budapest never stopped feeling heavy, but I began to feel the history of the place inform what I was looking at. Imperial, yes, but also the site where the boots of foreign soldiers walked, where revolutions were planned, where atrocities were committed, where students marched for freedom. Nothing of what follows has anything to do with beer, but, hey, the photos are pretty. I will caption them and try to take you on a mini tour through Budapest, with moments of important Hungarian history.

We’ll start at the Danube, which flows through the two halves of a town that were until 1873 separate cities. It took a literal bridge to unite Buda and Pest (pn “pesht”). The river is so massive and its flow so tremendous—it’s twice the width of Portland’s Willamette—that it no doubt posed a challenge to architects before then.

It’s axiomatic that in any old European city if you look up, you’ll find the castles and churches. They’re always placed on the highest point, for purposes of veneration, views, and defense. In Budapest, the hills are on the Danube’s east bank, and that’s where you find cobblestone roads winding up to the castle.

That castle looks impressive and imposing from down on the river, but it’s curiously unadorned and graceless the closer you get. It was completely destroyed in WWII and rebuilt during the Communist era that followed—with an aesthetic that eschewed ornamentation.

Christianity started making its way into Hungary as early as the fourth century, but it was King Stephen (István király), a devout Christian who took the throne around 1000 CE, who formally converted the country. That’s the relatively recent Basilica (1905) on the right, containing a relic of Stephen’s hand. In general, Hungary didn’t seem particularly devout, though, and most churches were not open for rando Americans like me to wander through.

If you look carefully at that third photo above, you’ll notice that the building flanking the Basilica to the left isn’t a lovely old Victorian-era building. In the interstices of the imperial capital are these remnants of the Communist era, which had its own unusual features. For one, it started, sort of, in 1919. That’s when Bela Kun led his small faction to create the Hungarian Soviet Republic—just the second communist government after Russsia’s. It only lasted five months, but the Communists took power again after the next World War. There’s a super cool museum in Budapest called Memento Park that contains salvaged Communist-era sculptures. It was one of the most interesting places I’ve ever seen, and told the history of Communism in Hungary dating back to the teens.

Budapest still has one of the most vibrant Jewish communities in Europe, but this Axis power had a familiar dark history. One of the most affecting locations in the city is on the riverbank near the Parliament Building. That’s where, in December 1944 and January 1945, the fascist Arrow Cross Party executed citizens, many of them Jews, letting their bodies fall into the river. They made them step out of their valuable shoes before the shooting, collecting them up afterward. The monument by the bank is simple—bronzed shoes from the era (not the actual shoes, though). I was staying near the Great Synagogue, one of a few in the neighborhood, which has beautiful lighted minarets (?) visible from blocks away.

Here are a few final shots of the city to give you a sense of it.