A Week in Budapest - Part II

    On Thursday and Friday we took short excursions to the countryside around Budapest.  First, on Thursday we went to the famous Danube Bend.  The Danube runs primarily east-west for nearly 2000 miles from the Black Hills in Germany to the Black Sea.  But just north of Budapest, the river makes a u-turn and then a sharp turn to the south so that it is running north-south when it divides Buda and Pest.  On a hill overlooking the Bend is Visegrad, a Medieval citadel with an incredible view of the river and the town on the far side.

    On the way to Visegrad we stopped to look at several Roman ruins including an amphitheater larger than the Colosseum. And of course there was an aqueduct.  The Romans needed their water and they loved the hot springs in Hungary.  When I listed everyone who had overrun Hungary, I think I forgot to mention the ancient Romans since that was so long ago.  Like Hadrian’s wall in England, there is a distinct line of demarcation in Hungary - the far extent of the Roman incursion.

    In the afternoon we drove to the huge basilica at Esztergom, the largest church and the tallest building in Hungary.  Like the castle at Visegrad, the basilica is on a hill overlooking the Danube.  Esztergom is the site of the coronation of King Steven, the first king of Hungary, in 1000, and the basement "houses" the crypts of several archbishops including Jozsef Mindszenty, famous for his opposition to both Nazi and Communist rule.  Gabe first took us across the Danube to see full on the commanding presence of the cathedral.  Across the river was Slovakia so we got a bonus half hour in a country I have never before visited. 

    When we returned to Budapest, we took a short, evening cruise on the Danube because Gabe assured us that it was the best way to appreciate how beautiful the city is.  As usual, he did not steer us wrong.

    On Friday we drove to Lake Balaton, the Lake Tahoe of Hungary.  It is huge - over fifty miles long - peaceful, and quite lovely.  Gabe assured us that everyone who lives in Budapest has a second home at Lake Balaton.  At the lake, we took a ferry ride to the Tihany Peninsula to visit the Benedectine Abbey there.

    The Tihany Abbey is another monument to lost Hungarian sovereignty.  There are three stories that dominate Hungary’s fate in the twentieth century.  Most recent was the Soviet Iron Curtain from 1945 to 1990.  Before that was World War II with Hungary’s shameful alliance with Germany, participation in the Holocaust, and then invasion by the Germans anyway.  Hitler decided that Budapest was strategically important and ordered that it never surrender but fight to the last man.  The Soviet Union “liberated” Budapest after pretty much destroying it in a siege that lasted longer than any other in the war except Stalingrad.  (It does seem like reading Hungary’s history is like reading the newspaper today about the Ukraine.)

    But the greatest source of Hungary’s national misery was the Treaty of Trianon which was part of the Paris Treaties of 1919 at the end of World War I.  Hungary lost two thirds of its land to Romania, the Czechoslovak Republic, Serbia, Croatia, and Austria.  It also lost its access to the sea and became a much smaller, land-locked country.  King Charles, who had been emperor of Austria and king of Hungary before the Austro-Hungarian Empire disappeared after the Great War, came back to Hungary in 1921 to resume rule over his kingdom.  At Tihany Abbey, he and his pregnant wife were politely interred in a room while his fate was decided.  After five days, they were equally politely escorted onto a ship to Madeira, never to set foot in Hungary again.  His eldest son, Crown Prince Otto, grew up stateless with no passport and was finally allowed to return to Austria after he formally gave up all claims to the Hapsburg throne in 1961.

    On Friday night we had a special treat:  a concert for two pianos performed by Lucas and Andrew Jussen, two incredibly cute, talented, and young brothers from the Netherlands.  They are 26 and 29 years old.

    On Saturday we finally made it back to the Buda side of the river.  On Tuesday we had walked briefly through the Castle District and visited the historic Gothic Matthias Church. Today, after visiting the Hungarian Museum of Fine Arts in Pest, we returned to Buda to enter the

Castle itself which is now the Hungarian National Gallery. Then it was back to Pest and the famous Opera House.

    David had grown up listening to his grandmother’s description of the fabulous Opera House in Budapest and really wanted to see it, but it was closed to tours.  So he bought a ticket to the ballet on Wednesday night that he had no interest in seeing just so he could walk into the theater and then leave.  Then we got lucky … sort of.  This week the Opera House opened for tours again, Gabe got us tickets for Saturday afternoon, and David blew off the ballet.  We got to the tour and saw … the lobby, the staircase, the balconies, and the lounges, but the orchestra was rehearsing and the theater was closed!  We asked the guide if we could just peek in and he told us that the rule is that you cannot go in during rehearsal, wink, wink.  We got the hint and lingered behind the tour and into the private boxes so we could see the inside.  Beautiful.  And David was happy.

    On Saturday night we went to another incredible concert, this time at the modern Mupa Theater.  Before the orchestra began to play, a choir sang one song beautifully and unaccompanied.  After the song they all took their places in the orchestra!  I know they are all professional musicians but who knew that an entire orchestra could sing as well as they played.

    And that was our incredible week in Budapest.  Gabe left on Saturday night and the Salems left early on Sunday morning, but the Sambergs stayed for half the day, so we went on our own to one of the more unusual sites that I have seen:  the Hospital in the Rock.  It turns out that the hills on the Buda side are laced with natural limestone caves.  In 1939 the authorities decided to link the caves and create an emergency hospital underground.  Designed to hold 60 patients, it had hundreds when it opened in 1944, with patients doubled up in beds and in the hallways.  The hospital has operating rooms and sterilizing equipment, but during the siege of Budapest, eventually food and water supplies were cut off.  Amazingly,  the medical staff kept on, doing whatever they could.  Later, in the 1960’s, the cave system was converted to a nuclear fallout shelter that, in retrospect, was very naively thought out.  It could hold only 60 people and had enough water for only two weeks.  Not very helpful if there really had been an atomic bomb strike.  So the second half of the tour was on the horrors of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and nuclear wars.

    After the Sambergs left, I had half a day to continue exploring Budapest.  I visited the home/museum of a stained glass artist, Miksa Roth, and the Hungarian National Museum.  On that last day, Marcee and I also finally had a chance to wonder through some Hungarian shops, and shared a chimney cake, a delicious Hungarian treat.  A perfect dessert for an interesting week so soaked in history and misery.

A Week In Budapest - Part I

     More than two years after my last trip abroad, I had the opportunity to take a one week trip to Budapest with Marcee and Mark Samberg, David and Laurie Salem, and their wonderful guide from previous trips, Gabe.   Snce I arrived a day early, on Sunday I took two quick walking tours to orient myself to the city.  The first tour met at the main cathedral of Budapest:  St. Stephen's.

This St. Stephen is not the first Christian martyr who was tortured in gruesome ways.  Rather, he was the first Christian Hungarian king, so as Gabe told us later when we went into the basilica, it is less a church and more a monument to Hungarian nationhood.

In Liberty Park we visited the fascinating monument that Victor Orban had put up in the middle of the night and the counter monument which is all the papers encased in plastic and hanging on the string in front of the monument.  In fifteen different languages, the counter monument explains why Orban's view of Hungary's role in WWII is wrong.  The counter monument cannot be removed because of freedom of speech laws.  More on why Orban's view is wrong later.

   
    The other signature buildings in Budapest are the Parliament on the Pest side of the Danube and the Castle on the Buda side.  The most significant feature of Hungary's geography is that it is completely flat on the Pest (eastern side) and mountainous on the Buda (western side).  When the hordes of Mongols and Huns arrived from Asia, they could ride their horses no further than Pest, while Buda maintained more of a European identity.  So while the flat plains allow Hungary to produce enough food, over the century, the Hungarians were overrun by everyone.  The Huns, the Turks, the Russians, the Austrians, the Romanians.  Everyone took a shot at poor Hungary.

The tour of the Jewish quarter with Gabe's fellow guide Agnes on Monday was fascinating.  Three incredible and incredibly different synagogues survive including the Dohany Street synagogue which is the largest in Europe and the second largest in the world, seating 3,000.  This is not a synagogue.  It is a church, complete with an organ.

    Then we went to the Rombach synagogue.  This is not a synagogue.  It is a mosque, complete with geometric designs on the walls.

    Finally the Kazinczy Street synagogue which looks like a synagogue inside.  It fact, it looks like the one that I attended as a child.  All three synagogues have balconies for the women.  Hungary developed its own reformed movement which it called Neologue (Latin for new law).  Despite the organ, the movement was not nearly as liberal as the German Reform movement, and kept much of traditional orthodox practice including separate seating for women.

    Prior to the Holocaust, Hungary had a thriving Jewish community of over 600,000 people.  I believe that Gabe said it was the second largest community in Europe after Poland.  Hungary allied itself with Germany in large part because Germany promised to restore to Hungary the lands it had lost after being on the losing side in WWI.  Present day Hungary is only one third the size of pre-WWI Hungary.  Despite fighting with the Germans against the Russians, and despite having passed repressive anti-Jewish laws similar to the Nuremberg laws, Hungary refused to transport its Jews to the East, which of course was a euphamism for the extermination camps.  When Hungary realized in 1944 that Germany was going to lose the war, they tried to switch sides, and Germany then invaded Hungary and took over.  In the last year of the war, Hungary was the site of the fastest and deadliest deportation of Jews.  Fully one third of the Jews murdered at Auschwitz were Hungarian Jews.

    The dispute about the Orban memorial has to do with the culpability of Hungary in the Holocaust.  Yes, the deportations did not occur until Germany took over, but although Adolph Eichmann came to Hungary himself, he had a staff of only twenty.  The deportation of hundreds of thousands of Jews took place with the active participation of the Hungarian authorities and police.  The Orban memorial assigns complete culpability to the Germans for the Hungarian holocaust, while the counter-memorials acknowledge, and to the extent that they can, apologize for, the role of Hungarians.  

  

On Wednesday we visited the excellent Holocaust Museum which, like the counter-memorials, explained in great detail the sad sequence of events and responsibility.  Then we went to the promenade along the Danube and the site of one of the most unique and touching Holocaust Memorials that I have ever seen.  Sculptures of pairs of shoes are lined up where, after the deportations stopped, Jews were lined up, removed their shoes and were shot, falling into the Danube.  To save bullets, several people were tied together and only one was shot.

    In the afternoon, we visited the Soviet Statue Park.  After the fall of Communism, people removed all of the large statues that the Soviets had placed prominently around the city, and placed them in a park outside the city.  All except the massive statue of Lenin.  During the uprising in 1956, people had tried to topple the statue but it was too big.  And it was too hard to remove from the plinth.  So they cut it off at the top of boots, and then tore the body apart.

And our late afternoon activity:  when in Rome ...

When in Budapest, enjoy a soak in one of the many hot spring fed baths, the fabulously ornate Szechenyi Baths.