Joe Hajdu -Budapest- A History of Grandeur and Catastrophe

8/20/2019 Joe Hajdu -Budapest- A History of Grandeur and Catastrophe

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About the Author

Dr. Joe Hajdu is a cultural geographer. He is attached to Deakin University

in Melbourne, Australia as an Honorary Fellow. In a long academic career

he has carried out research in Australia, Germany, and the United Kingdom.His previous books have included a cultural geographic study of Australia

aimed at visitors who seek to immerse themselves into the topic beyondwhat the standard tourist guide provides, a description of the cultural impact

of the Japanese on the Gold Coast in northeast Australia in the 1980s, astudy of the effect on economic linkages and people’s lives of the West-East

German border prior to 1989, and a recent book on the transformation ofBerlin after 1990 from being a marginalized, divided city to again being the

capital and culturally vibrant metropolis of a reunited Germany. Budapest: A

History of Grandeur and Catastrophe is his first research and book project

carried out in his birthplace, Hungary.


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Joe Hajdu

BUDAPEST :A H I ST O R Y O F G R A N D E U R A N D

C A T A S T R O P H E


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Copyright © Joe Hajdu (2015)

The right of Joe Hajdu to be identified as author of this work has been

asserted by him in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the

Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any

means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,

without the prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorized act in relation to this

publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims fordamages.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British

Library.

ISBN 978 1 78455 218 3

www.austinmacauley.com

First Published (2015)

Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd.

25 Canada Square

Canary Wharf

LondonE14 5LB

Printed and bound in Great Britain


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Acknowledgments

The idea for this book has been floating around in my head for quite some

time, but other writing projects took precedence, until my wife Judy musthave felt nothing would ever happen and started muttering: ‘You should

really start working on a Budapest book. That city was an important part ofyour life. Also, that will give us an excuse to spend longer times there than

we have until now.’ That did it. I’d often felt I would really like to spend

more time in Budapest to explore it in greater detail and try to immersemyself in its complexities. Earlier visits to the city had meant meeting

relatives and friends. Outside this circle I had never really had more than

superficial contact with Hungarians. Working on this book gave that

opportunity, and through these discussions with people I had sought out, I

have gained a great deal of information on Budapest and benefited fromthese people’s experiences, insights and opinions. These discussants have

also given me something less specific: they have given me a better sense of

the psyche of the Budapest person, their feelings, hopes and fears, not tomention a sense of the touches of that bittersweet Budapest irony to which I

have always been partial.

So firstly I would like express my thanks to the people in Budapest who

agreed to give me of their time so generously and entered into a detailed

discussion with me about the issues which I had raised with them, andsharpened my awareness of many things about the city that previously I hadonly dimly sensed. In some cases they also gave me specialised literature

which was freighted back to Australia and so made a valuable contribution

to the richness of the story that follows. My discussants (in alphabeticalorder) are: Gábor Aczél, Tamás Antalffy, Antal Arato, Gábor Demszky,

Tamás Egedy, József Finta, Gábor Gaylhoffer, Viktor Iro, György Kévésand his partner Eva Földváry, Gábor Nándor, Gábor Székely, Szabolcs Szita,

Iván Tosics and András Török. I thank them all most sincerely.

There is another group of people who have facilitated my book project,

not specifically through an interview, but through various other ways. Forexample, by being the intermediary between me and an interviewee, making

me aware of sources of information or helping me collect information,


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helping me access historical photographs and their transmission by

computer, or in casual conversation giving me clues that set me thinkingabout issues I had not previously considered or that led to new sources of

information. In this way, they have been most helpful in the furtherance of

this book project. They are: Elayne Antalffy, János Borbély, Miklós

Bordács, Ferenc Herczeg, Judit Jórend, Rita Katz, Sandor Szakály and JánosVáti.

I hope that none of these people I have mentioned will be disappointedwith my book.

Finally, my wife Judy definitely deserves another mention. Apart from

being very supportive of this whole project, more specifically, she hasencouraged me to bounce ideas off her that have made my text more

interesting. She has also been of great help in the word processing of themanuscript, and been an invaluable help with the proofreading of the text.

Nagyon szépen köszönöm!


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Contents

Introduction 13

1. The Historic Heart of Budapest: The Castle District 22

2. Golden Age of the Metropolis: Fin de Siècle Budapest 38

3. Vilmos Vazsonyi and the Budapest Haute Bourgeoisie 55

4. Jewish Budapest: Triumph and Tragedy of its Life and Culture 66

5. Budapest after 1945: Tyranny and Social Cleansing 83

6. Revolution and the Transformation of Budapest under Socialism 125

7. Közraktár Utca 12a: A Mirror of the Changing Budapest 141

8. Budapest: From Moribund Communism to Volatile Capitalism 146

9. Gábor Demszky and Governing Post-Communist Budapest 162

10. Budapest Today: Its Changing Scene, Successes and Dilemnas 178

11. From the Broadway of Budapest to The Island Rock Festival: Culture

and Entertainment in Contemporary Budapest 194

Afterword 212

Bibliography 216


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Sources of the illustrations

Plates 1.1 & 2.1 Országos Széchényi Könyvtár;

Plates 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, 1.5, 2.4 & 6.2 Budapest Antikvárium;Plates 2.2, 2.3, 3.1 & 4.2 Kiscelli Muzeum;

Plates 5.2, 6.3, 10.4 & 11.4 Médiaszolgáltatás-támogató és Vagyonkezelö Alap(MTVA);

Plates 2.5, 2.6, 2.7, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4, 4.1 4.3, 4.4, 5.1, 5.3, 5.4, 6.1, 6.4, 6.5, 7.1, 8.1, 8.2,8.3, 8.4, 8.5, 9.1, 10.1, 10.2, 10.3, 10.5, 10.6, 10.7, 11.1, 11.2, 11.3, 11.5, 11.6 &

11.7 Joe Hajdu.


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Legend: 1. Matthias Church and Fishermen’s Bastion2. Royal Palace

3. Gellert Hill4. Széchényi Chain Bridge5. Parliament House6. Opera House7. St. Stephen’s Basilica 8. National Museum9. Heroes Square and Millenium Monument


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INTRODUCTION

Budapest has been somewhere in my mind all my life. For most of us the

memories of childhood are usually fragmentary and blurred, yet these blurred memories often contain some scenes of surprising sharpness that

have embedded themselves into our psyche. How can we tell the extent to

which they have helped form our opinions, prejudices and secret fears? I can

only hope to surmise what the experiences of my early years have done tome.

For the first five and a half years of my life I spent long periods in ourapartment in Budapest. I remember it as a modern, bright, airy place with a

balcony on the first floor of a small block, with a lawn and a few flowers between the front door and the gate leading to the footpath on the street.

Standing on the balcony and looking to one side, I recall some hills in the

distance. They must have been the Buda Hills, and looking the other way, I

have a vague sense of flatness and buildings half hidden by trees. But it is

specific images and specific experiences of Wartime Budapest which areetched most deeply into my memory.

It was the summer of 1944 and the tide of war had definitely turned in

favour of the Allies. For most people nocturnal bombing raids on Budapest by Allied bombers had become part of daily life. I would go to bed and be

just starting to slide into my slumber when the piercing wail of the air raidsirens would wake me up with a jolt, or my mother or father would race into

the bedroom and shake me to wake up and hurriedly pull me down withthem into the cellar. As we raced down the stairs there were mumblings

about that ‘foolhardy woman’ in the apartment above us who refused to go

down into the cellar. She claimed she knew better, and said that she wouldonly seek shelter if there was real danger (during the siege of Budapest the

building was damaged by fire, but I have never found out if on that occasion

the woman upstairs did go down into the cellar or not). The air raids would


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last for the best part of the night, so it was usually by the light of dawn that

we were able to climb the stairs back up to our apartment. There was oneoccasion during that summer which I remember quite specifically: the

bombers had come, and down in the cellar the noise of the exploding bombs

and air pressure vibrations that followed them seem to have been particularly

severe; eventually they ceased, it was still again outside and it was safe to go back up. We entered the apartment and walked across the living room onto

the balcony. It was dawn and looking towards the Pest side of the Danube

River the sky was streaked a bright red and grey. “Ah”, my father said, “itlooks as if they’ve really hit the factories and shipyards on Csepel Island (in

the Danube) this time.”

As much as they could, people tried to continue living normal lives, butthe reminders that life was not normal kept intruding. One day my mother

and I were walking in a park not far from our apartment. It was a sunnyafternoon and there were quite a few people strolling on the paths and

enjoying the ambience of the park. That afternoon the place was like an oasis

of peace in a wartime city. I remember casually watching the people walking past until something caught my eye. Some of the men and women I saw had

a yellow star sewn onto their jacket or blouse. I had no idea what the yellow

star meant and why these people had it on their clothes. I couldn’t help but

ask my mother. This afternoon as always, she chattered away in her usual

manner, but on hearing my question she suddenly leant over towards me,lowered her voice and said: “They are Jews, that’s why.” I don’t remember

whether I pursued the matter any further. I suspect an answer at this level

would have satisfied the curiosity of a five-year-old.

By the late autumn of 1944 the front-line between the German army and

the advancing Soviet forces was moving inexorably closer to Budapest. TheGerman high command had decided to make Budapest a fortress that they

were determined to hold at all cost. This meant that the Soviet siege of the

city was going to be long and bloody. We had already left the family estatein eastern Hungary to escape the fighting and now we were getting ready toflee again. Petrol was not to be had for private use under any circumstances,

so using our car was out of the question. My father had organised that a

number of our horses from the estate be brought to Budapest and

accommodated in stables on the Pest side of the river. It was now 4 th of

November, the Russian army was approaching Budapest, and we haddecided to flee westwards by horse and carriage. My father, two brothers and

a hired hand from the estate went to get the horses and carriages. They

would drive them across one of the Danube River bridges, bring them to ourBuda home and we would then pack what we could and set off the next day.

As it happened, the bridge they had used to cross the Danube was theMargaret Bridge at the northern end of central Budapest. It was midday and

the bridge was packed with pedestrians, trams, carriages, buses and cyclists.


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My father and his party crossed the bridge and were two or three hundred

meters away from it on the Buda side when they heard a huge explosion.They swung around and saw that the Margaret Bridge had been blown sky

high. Close to two hundred people lost their lives, the exact total has never

been established. As part of their strategy to slow the Soviet advance the

Germans had mined all the bridges across the Danube. It was claimed thatgas leaking from a pipeline on the bridge had ignited the gunpowder, but

there were also rumours that members of the anti-German resistance in

Budapest had set off the charges; we will never know. My mother and Iheard the noise of the shattering explosion in our apartment, and had an

agonising half hour or so wondering whether we would see the rest of thefamily again.

We did set off the next morning and I remember sitting next to my

parents in one of the carriages as the horses’ hooves clip-clopped through theouter suburbs of Budapest. When we reached the open country my father

turned around to look at the Buda hills retreating towards the horizon. He

nudged my mother and said: “Turn around and have a last look. I’m sure youwon’t see Budapest again.”

He was quite right, she didn’t see Budapest again. As for me, two

decades later, after having grown-up in the Antipodes, I did see Budapest

again. I went there in July 1965 and was shocked by what I saw. There wasan all pervading greyness about the city. One had to look behind the peeling

stucco and paint to detect the past grandeur of its major buildings. Budapest

had not really overcome its wounds from the siege of the winter of 1944-45when the bloody 1956 revolution occurred. Even in the early 1960s battle

scars and bullet holes were a common sight, and the faces of the people were

like a parchment on which one could read the hardship and sorrow they hadexperienced in the preceding couple of decades. I stayed with a friend and

his parents. They were very hospitable to me, and so I wanted to buy them a

present of some sort. There wasn’t much to be had in the shops. I finallyfound a plastic water jug which I thought my friend’s mother might finduseful. Well, when I gave it to her, she was absolutely thrilled. She treated it

like some rare, precious memento of my visit. The family lived in a large

double-storey Buda villa whose owner had left and it was now subdivided

into a number of small flats. The dwelling was in a shocking state of

disrepair. The main room in which my friend and his parents lived made megasp: the ceiling was sagging dangerously, and to prevent it collapsing, two

strategically placed timber columns had been inserted into the central part of

the room. You had to duck and weave around these columns when goingfrom the table to the couch/bed or to open a window. It was this room and

everything it said about Budapest that I remembered most vividly from myreturn visit to the city as a young adult.


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Since then fifty years have passed, and needless to say, much has

changed in Budapest. The city today is very different, and the signs of itsrecent transformation, achievements and problems are there to see: the large

number of statues, memorials, monuments, wall plaques and street names

that show a determined desire to remember events and to honour people

involved in the sharp twists and turns of Hungarian history; the stately andornate buildings of Budapest’s glory years the roofs and walls of some now

herald the arrival of capitalism through large advertisers billboards; the

gleaming new hotels on the riverfront for the well-healed foreign business person and tourist; a colourful café life that strikes an echo of the ‘old

Budapest’; the attractive landscaping of the pedestrianized streets in thecentre; the large new arts centre with its rich cultural fare on the banks of the

Danube; young people from all over Europe and beyond crowding into oneof the city’s numerous improvised bars; the plethora of small shops that

seem to exist more on hope than profit; peeling stucco and paint on oldapartment buildings that say something about the poverty of their residents;

the strikingly numerous pawn shops in many parts of the city; homeless men

on some park benches and in alcoves of buildings arranging their meagre belongings to convey a sense of permanence; the sight of new office

complexes and designer label shops that show their owners’/financiers’ faith

in the future of the city; the large prefabricated housing estates on its fringe,

and the increasing number of new villas discreetly half-hidden on wooded

hillsides and in verdant hollows in the more desirable locations of the city.

Budapest today is all this and more. It is a city trying to come to terms

with the inheritance of its recent history, while not being quite certain whatits place will be in the Europe of the 21 st Century. It is a uniquely interesting

place, at the same time the experience of the convulsions that have rocked it

during the last hundred years it shares with the likes of Prague, Warsaw,Belgrade and Bucharest. In 1989-90 all these cities experienced the

implosion of the socialist system. Many of the people living in these cities

believed that somehow this would herald a return to ‘normalcy’. Their ideaof normalcy was the erasure of socialist internationalism and a longing for areturn to their old national culture combined with contemporary West

European standards of living and social security. However, the world doesn’t

work like that. Over forty years of socialist dictatorship had a major impact

on the institutions, the society, the political culture, economy, not to mention

the attitudes and behaviour of the people living in these countries. Whensocialism ended the initial widespread euphoria was quickly followed by the

sobering realisation that becoming like an Austria, West Germany or France

in a few short years was an illusion. The adjustment to a new world wouldtake much longer than that.

Many people who had only known east European socialism were not

ready for the psychological readjustment required for the world of


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competitive capitalism. There were some people who did quickly perceive

that new skills were now needed to succeed and used the collapse of thesocialist order and the legal, institutional and moral chaos that followed to

apply their entrepreneurial skills for legitimate business purposes or the most

dubious financial ends. Such blatant acts of financial criminality did not help

the new, freely elected, largely inexperienced national and localgovernments to establish institutions and develop and conduct policies that

would guide the transition from socialism to a free market economy and

democratic institutions. At the same time, while these eastern Europeancountries were going through these tumultuous changes, their neighbours in

western Europe were themselves being increasingly challenged by the pressures of globalisation, particularly the rise of Asian competitors with

more flexible labour markets and lower costs. In the early 1990s German,Austrian and French companies quickly saw Warsaw, Prague and Budapest

as a low-cost site to manufacture their products. But twenty years later, withthe lure of an even cheaper China, Thailand, Turkey and India, the economic

attractiveness of eastern Europe is less obvious.

A large city like Budapest today encapsulates many of these issues and

problems of the tumultuous transition from socialism to the globalised free

enterprise world. It is also a major European metropolis, and the capital of a

country with a proud, distinctive culture that makes it a uniquely fascinating

place. So an account of Budapest is both worthwhile for its own sake as wellas for the insight it provides into the cultural-economic processes that have

affected the eastern half of the European continent during the last two and a

half decades.

This book does not purport to be a comprehensive history of Budapest, a

number of other writers have undertaken that task in an admirable manner.But to understand the present one cannot ignore some aspects of the past.

One has to start with the historic core of Budapest. This is the small castle

district of Buda, perched on top of a prominent hilltop, close to the western banks of the Danube. This settlement was and still is a unique place that isquite separate from the rest of the metropolis and visible from many parts of

inner Budapest. Because of its historic and symbolic importance, no account

of Budapest would be complete without an account of its appearance, role in

the history of the city, and the lives of some of the people who have lived

there and its role in the Budapest of today.

However it was the tumultuous growth Budapest experienced from the

second half of the 19th Century to the outbreak of the First World War thathave made the city what it is today. For reasons which I will attempt to make

clear, those were the formative years of modern Budapest. Despite twoworld wars, revolutions, widespread destruction and reconstruction, and

numerous changes of regime, the imprint set by the 1867-1914 period still


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defines much of the city that visitors see. Where more recent developments

have occurred, their architectural style is no doubt different, but they have been inserted into a spatial and configurative pattern set during the modern

city’s formative era. It is only in the outer districts, such as on their route

from Ferihegy Airport into central Budapest, that the visitor will be aware of

new urban shapes and forms dominating the landscape. For example, oldvillage buildings having been overwhelmed by housing estates and

warehouses, freeways cutting through residential suburbs, or a shopping mall

that is a modest version of what is found in suburban Chicago, London orMelbourne.

The grandeur of Budapest in its glory days at the beginning of the 20 th

Century was found in the central city on the Pest side of the Danube. Theimpressive, public buildings, the neoclassical, Neo-Renaissance and

historicist apartment blocks, the boulevards, the numerous cafés, restaurants,and theatres were the milieu of the rising middle class of Budapest.

Nagykörut , or the Grand Boulevard and its tangential Andrássy út became

the most prestigious addresses of this haute bourgeoisie. The buildings theretoday still attest to the past presence of this social group. A chapter will

describe the world of fin-de-siècle Budapest and the life of a family that

enjoyed its privileges and give glimpses of the poverty and squalor that

existed behind it. It must also be said a few progressive public figures did

attempt to improve the lives of this large working class. The Wekerle gardencity project on the outskirts of Budapest will be explored as an example of

this endeavour.

The catastrophe of the First World War changed everything for Hungary.

Much of the optimism was gone, and the financial situation of many

members of the middle class became much more precarious. World WarTwo was a new convulsion for Hungary, particularly for the many Jewish

members of Budapest’s bourgeoisie and its poorer orthodox brethren. A

chapter will introduce the rich and diverse world of Jewish Budapest andthrough the lives of a number of its members describe the catastrophe that befell them in 1944-45. Hungary, allied to Nazi Germany, was again on the

losing side of the War and paid the price. Soviet occupation led to the

imposition of a Communist dictatorship, and this time it was its political

opponents and members of the old Hungarian upper and middle classes that

were its main victims. Using newly compiled information, a chapter willdescribe the story of the fate of large groups of Budapest’s ar istocratic and

bourgeois families during the 1948-53 period.

Budapest under socialism did not stand still. While the old building

heritage of inner Budapest was largely left as was, large prefabricatedhousing estates were built on the fringes of the city to deal with the housing

shortage and accommodate the flow of people into the metropolis who came


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to work in its expanding machinery plants, chemical factories and shipyards.

Today these housing estates are still home to a surprisingly large part of the population of Budapest. So the role they play in the life of the city and how

they have been adapted to changing expectations and needs, belongs to any

study of the metropolis.

The implosion of the Communist dictatorship and the negotiated transfer

of power to a subsequently democratically elected government in 1989-90

occurred with a suddenness that surprised most Hungarians. This processwas mirrored at every level of government, including in the city of Budapest.

Though the distinct politico/ administrative organs of the metropolitan citygovernment had continued to exist during the forty years of the socialist

regime, power was centralized in the hands of the national Communist PartyCentral Committee. Hence issues of the division of responsibility and power

were largely irrelevant. This meant that the tumultuous change to democracyin Budapest brought issues of governance to the fore, coupled with the

division of public assets among different levels of government, and then

their possible private sale. At the same time Budapest saw a flood of newarrivals. This was driven in part by a euphoric sense of freedom, or their

grim dislocation through the collapse of old inefficient state enterprises in

which they had been employed. This resulted in Budapest being confronted

with a series of complex, at times interlocking problems that would have

tested the skills of an experienced city government, instead it had newlyelected leaders busy defining their respective powers, inexperienced in

working within a democratic political culture and confronted with economic

decisions for which there was no precedent. The problems with whichBudapest was confronted in 1989-90 and the way it managed them are still

issues for Budapest today. Hence they are a key theme of this book, a theme

that repeated itself in the other major cities of the now ex-Communist bloc.

What made these problems, or at least their management or solution

even less tractable was a more profound moral issue, namely the absence orweakness of civil society and public morality. The traditional morality ofJudaic-Christian bourgeois culture, which more or less is still the yardstick

for Western countries, though by no means always practised, was

consciously undermined by the Communist regime to be replaced by the

superior morality of a homo sovieticus. In Hungary, in fact in much of

eastern Europe, this did not succeed, and in the final phase of the Communistera it gave way to Kadarism that ceased to proselytize amongst the

population, but maintained its public Marxist rhetoric. At the same time the

Kadar regime reached policy compromises with the Hungarian people thatcontradicted its rhetoric. This it sought to do to gain the acquiescence of the

population after the trauma of the 1956 revolution. The result was that inHungarian public life there developed a wide gap between what was said and

what was done, or at least, what was not penalised. After 1989 this general


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hypocrisy in public life did not facilitate the creation and functioning of a

positive, participatory democratic public culture. No discussion of Budapesttoday would be complete without some mention of a certain moral malaise

that is still there a good two decades later.

At the same time in the Budapest of today, many importantdevelopments of the last two decades can be seen: the results of widespread

private investment in offices, hotels, logistics operations and private

apartment complexes. There are also urban rehabilitation and beautification projects that are visible to all visitors and are the subject of laudatory

comment by local residents. It is this city that the large flow of visitors toBudapest see today. They are symbols of a city that is trying to define itself

as part of the affluent, increasingly globalised world. Behind it are economicand population changes that have had a far-reaching impact on the city.

These will be sketched briefly in the text.

There have been individual success stories in the Budapest of today. A

large number of entrepreneurial men and women saw their chance and tookit. Through inexperience, bad luck, political chicanery or uncertain economic

conditions some have failed, or are in a constant struggle to keep their

businesses afloat. Others have been singularly successful. Examples of both

successful local and foreign entrepreneurship in Budapest will be mentioned.

They illustrate the optimistic face of Budapest today. Another aspect of thevibrant and cosmopolitan Budapest is its arts and entertainment scene:

theatre, classical and pop music, cinema, museums, art galleries. Despite

increasing financial stringencies the city offers a rich fare for both its owncitizens and for visitors. It is to enjoy such functions, as well as to savour the

city’s gastronomic delights and the ambience of its Danube River setting that

a large flow of visitors come to Budapest and so help underpin its still lessthan robust economy.

Finally, there is the need to briefly consider the impact on Budapest of periodic political change within Hungary since the implosion of Communistdictatorship. In all democratic states, the effect of political change at the

national level resonates to lower levels of government. But in Hungary this

has been particularly sharp whenever there has been a change of power at the

national level, that is, during 1998-2002 and since 2010. To understand this,

we have to consider the very deep chasm that exists in Hungary betweenLeft and Right, a chasm that reflects certain features of Hungarian culture,

the people’s recent politico-cultural experience, and more specifically, the

perception of Budapest in the rest of the country. The ability of the Budapest political elite to set goals for the city, and to work jointly to make progress

towards their achievement is hampered by these deep politico-culturaldivisions. The prospects for Budapest at the beginning of the 21st Century

are clearly linked to this issue. This book will conclude with some comments


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on contemporary political culture in Budapest and some indications of what

the future may hold for this frequently ravaged, complex and fascinatingcity.


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1. The Historic Heart of Budapest: TheCastle District

For the visitors who arrive in Budapest by boat, or who after their arrival by

car or aeroplane, walk to the edge of the Danube, cannot fail to see thehistoric heart of the metropolis: the Várhegy or Castle Hill of Buda. From

the promenade on the Pest side they will see a flat-topped hill set back from

the opposite bank of the Danube rising one hundred and fifty metres aboveits surrounds. Resting on top of the southern section of this flat hill is the

Baroque Royal Palace topped by a round dome. The Palace is low rather

than massive, ornamental rather than soaring. It does not dominate its site,

on the contrary the dimensions of the Palace blend with the contours of thehill. It appears rather like an organic extension of the plateau on which it

rests. Looking towards the northern section of the Castle Hill the viewer seesthe ensemble of the neo-gothic spire of the Matthias Church and a long, low-

slung extension of a building of unknown function, all apparently ringed bythe colonnades and towers of the Fishermen’s Bastion. The visitor is not to

know that the building of unknown function has no historic importance, and

is the cleverly inserted Budapest Hilton. The theatricality of this scene isfurther enhanced by the gentle bend of the Danube River to the south and the

historic Chain Bridge arching above the river on its northern side.

The setting of Budapest has always been one of its main charms. Vienna,Belgrade and Bratislava may be on the Danube, but one can sightsee in them

while ignoring the river. Budapest is bisected by the Danube and is defined

by its relationship with the river. The hills of Buda form a contrast with the

flat terrain of Pest, and the ordered largely four to six storey buildings there

create a very different picture to the villas and small apartment buildings inthe greenery on the slopes of the Buda hills. The panorama of the city and

the river forms a visual spectacle which is enhanced on summer evenings by

the floodlighting of the main bridges and the key buildings of the BudaCastle Hill.

The urban district on top of Castle Hill is geographically and culturally

quite distinct from the rest of the city. This hill, about a kilometre and a half


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long north-south and four hundred metres wide east-west, is even today like

a small town inside a big city. One needs to walk up a steep slope to get to it,or catch a bus that winds its way up a narrow road to the top. Cars are

banned from the narrow, cobbled streets on the top. This is just as well,

because during the height of the tourist season the streets and squares around

its historic public buildings are thronged with visitors from all parts of theworld. To understand Budapest one has to know something about the history

of Buda Castle Hill.

There have been small farm houses with orchards, and vegetable gardens

on the lower slopes of Castle hill at least since Celtic times, though later theRomans established their settlement 8km to the north on the banks of the

Danube and called it Aquincum. This was near another establishedsettlement at Obuda (Old Buda). There was also a small settlement on the

left bank of the river, on the Pest side. The Hungarian tribes settled in theCarpathian Basin in 895-6 AD, but largely ignored the strategic value of the

Buda hill. The Tatar invasions of 1241 devastated Hungary, historians have

estimated that six out of ten settlements in the lowlands were destroyed. Thisincluded Obuda and Pest. Also, much of the country’s farmland was laid

waste. About one third of the population perished through Tatar brutality or

starvation. King Béla IV (1235-1270) realised that the rebuilt towns and

villages would need fortifications to withstand any further Tatar incursions.

So in 1243 he ordered the building of fortifications around the top of BudaHill and moved people from what was left of the adjacent settlements to this

newly fortified site. Water was thought to be a problem at this isolated site,

but water seeping down through the limestone rock of the hill had dissolvedsome of the subterranean rock to form a series of caves. Some of these have

collected water and so provided the growing township with fresh drinking

water. Not only the local Hungarian population came to settle in Buda,settlers were also encouraged to come from the German-speaking lands,

some came from Nuremberg, the most important medieval commercial

centre in central Europe. There were also Jews and Serbs, and by the beginning of the 14th century all this helped make Buda a thriving town ofmerchants and craftsmen. The city traded with places as far apart as Cracow

in Poland, St Gallen in Switzerland and Frankfurt in Germany. Béla IV

ordered the building of a royal palace at the southern end of Castle Hill and

made it the seat of his royal court.

The second half of the 15th Century and the beginning of the 16 th Century

was the golden age of feudal Buda. The royal court, the central government

bodies and the courts of law were there. As a result many of the highernobility and the senior clergy also lived in Buda. King Matthias I (1458-

1490) rebuilt the royal palace in Renaissance style with splendid colonnades,ornamental gardens and banquet rooms. He also invited many Italian

scholars and artists to his court to make Buda a centre of European culture.

Joe Hajdu -Budapest- A History of Grandeur and Catastrophe

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