Budapest

Hungarians trace their history back to the Magyar invasion of 896. The Magyars then assembled an impressive kingdom that included parts of modern Romania, Croatia, Slovakia and Ukraine. After the Ottoman invasion of 1526, Hungary was sliced into three parts. Buda remained under Turkish control until the Habsburgs evicted the Turks in 1686. Hapsburg domination began to decline in the mid-19th century after Austria’s 1866 defeat to Prussia and granted Hungary a degree of independence in the formation of a dual monarchy: the Austro-Hungarian state.

With its defeat in WWI, the Austro-Hungarian state collapsed and Hungary emerged as a republic. But Hungary had lost the war and the 1920 treaty of Trianon took more than two-thirds of its land. By the 1940's, the desire to reclaim this land drove Hungary’s leaders into the arms of Nazi Germany; by 1944, Nazi Germany had installed the fascist Arrow Cross Party with thousands of Hungarian Jews deported to Auschwitz. The war ended and in 1947 the Communists came to power.
Such a historical skeleton – the bones giving shape, protecting the innards– permeates the city: each building or organ showcases another epoch, offers another example of syncretism between cultures and traditions. The river, or blood flow, pulsates with vitality. Budapest, I think, wears its turbulent history proudly.

I leave the famous Gothic parliament sitting precariously on the banks of the Danube. I turn once more and admire the fabulously ostentatious structure. You cannot mistake this building for another. It is the quintessential Hungarian marker. In 1846, at a time when Hungarians protested for further independence, the Hungarian poet Mihaly Vorosmarty lamented the realty that his nation lacked a home. Sure, the National Palace stood proudly on Buda’s hills above, but the burgeoning democratic movement craved a space where greater numbers of people – beyond the priests, noblemen, aristocrats and princes – could debate and direct the country’s future. Hungary’s home was to be built on the flat Pest side symbolizing newly minted democratic values. Finished in 1898, a millennium after the arrival of the first Magyars, Parliament combines a wonderful millage of different architectural styles: its exterior exhibits Gothic tendencies – the spiky and sharp turrets guard the central dome – while the interior has many Renaissance and Gothic elements. Statues of treasured Hungarians line the exterior façade. At night, the Parliament buildings eerily shine appearing like a UFO that just happened to land on the Danube’s shores. The Parliament’s architectural cocktail of designs coolly represents the city itself: different parts constituting a unique, functioning whole.

I walk the Promenade until I reach Szechenyi lanchid, also known as the Chain Bridge. Two stone lions guard its entrance. I try to photograph its meticulously chiseled face – eyes, nose, and mouth - with the blushing Buda castle atop Varhegy. It remains fuzzy, unfocused. It’s better like that. Opened in 1849, the great connector between the city’s two halves was razed to the ground by the Nazis in 1945 to halt the progressing Red Army. The city subsequently rebuilt it. History restored. I cross the bridge; lights glitter and bounce across the still water.

The Buda Castle complex, also known as the Royal Palace, houses several important buildings besides the palace: the National Gallery and the Budapest Museum to name just two. In the early 14th century, King Lajos the Great laid the foundations of the palace. Over the next seven hundred years, the palace would be besieged, destroyed or partially destroyed, thirty one times. It adopted, at one point or another, a vast array of different architectural designs: Romantic, Gothic, Baroque and finally Classical after the Second World War. As I saunter through the districts, remnants of the past pop-out around every turn. Statues, fountains, columns all recall a distinctive period in the city’s multicolored past, all proudly revere each cog in its historical wheel. The statue to Statue of Prince Eugene of Savoy, the man who liberated Budapest from the Turks, soars; the bas-relief magnificently depicts Turkish retreats and surrenders. To the south, I spot the Citadel built by the Hapsburg after the failed 1848 Hungarian revolution. The Szabadsag szobar, Independence Monument, towers above in the form of a woman holding a leaf proclaiming freedom throughout the city. The monument commemorates the Soviet soldiers ve died liberating the city from Nazi rule.

A curious thing: I later learn that the Cyrillic names of the dead soldiers as well as the statue immortalizing their victory were removed in the early 1990s. In fact, all Soviet statues depicting Communist notables, Hungarian, Soviet or otherwise, were all up-rooted or disassembled and transported to a nondescript park outside the city when Communism fell in 1989. Staring at the silent woman stoically surveying her city below, I think about what happens when a history is too painful to remember. What happens when we are encouraged to forget? Or forced to remember?

In the snowy park, I stare at gigantic statues of Mark, Engels, Lenin and monuments to other Red symbols. They appear cold, vacant – devoid of all traces of life, austere and artificial. Too convenient. And that is what troubles me about this secluded, out-of-sight park: all nuances are lost. Communism is bad; Capitalism is good. History everywhere, including in Hungary itself, has shown that nothing is so dichotomous, nothing so black-and-white. Of course, the Hungarian Communists committed atrocities; the reprisals that followed the 1956 uprising were horrific. Yet how many Jews did the Hungarian Nazis march to Auschwitz? How many people died in the many construction projects of the Hapsburgs? How many people did the original Maygars brutalize to seize this slice of land? How many people made destitute with the painful transition to capitalism? These violent events remain fastened to the city’s fabric, irrevocably planted and part of its identity.

I look at these figures and feel neither pride nor hatred, neither acceptance nor disavowal. I find qualities of Marx that I adhere, others I eschew. I find some aspects of communism commendable, others abhorrent. Yet by creating a carnival-esque freak show out of these statues, a real sense of Hungarian history has evaporated, transformed into a crude and capitalistic caricature. Of course, I am outsider, unfamiliar to the daily humiliations of living under totalitarianism. And I can understand the need to cleanse a space, to start afresh. But history cannot be moved or neatly swept away; its repercussions and legacies remain anchored to a spot and to a people. With the gulf between the rich and the poor continuing to widen and helplessness replacing hopefulness worldwide, perhaps in three hundred years the Budapest stock exchange, the designer shops along Vaci Utca will all be imprisoned in a park somewhere outside of town.

I return to my hostel with no easy answers; there is no ending. And for that, I am eternally thankful both to Buda and to Pest.