I could never claim to be well-travelled, but I do enjoy getting out of Scotland when the opportunity appears and last week I returned from a ten day visit to Budapest. For various reasons, I had long wished to visit Hungary. Most of all, I discovered the 20th century Hungarian composer Bela Bartok whilst in my early twenties and have loved his music ever since. My interest in his work expanded to an interest in Hungarian culture, and it became clear to me that this was a unique and fascinating country.
Hungarians speak a language that is quite unrelated to most Indo-European tongues, by dint of their post-Roman migration to central Europe from central Asia. Hungary’s key strategic position has brought its people a long list of successive waves of invaders and occupiers – Mongols, Christian emperors, Ottoman Turks, Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union – but the distinctiveness of their culture has lent Hungarians an independence of spirit which has always re-emerged whole from the country’s troubled history.
Hungarian parliament building on the banks of the Danube.
Budapest is a city of some two million people, by far the largest in the country, and visually is an effective mirror into Hungary’s past. Many of the older buildings were either damaged or destroyed during the Second World War, but restoration work has been continuous since and today there is enough distinctively Hungarian architecture, ancient and modern, to reflect the Hungarian outlook. The late nineteenth century Gothic revival took a distinctive form, perhaps at its best in the parliament building on the banks of the Danube, but surviving too in some of the buildings in the commercial districts. Older buildings such as Matyas church on Buda show an earlier fascination with the Gothic style that has influenced the country’s aesthetic taste ever since.
Gothic revivalism, Hungarian style.
Architecture aside, there is plenty to engage the interest in Budapest; museums and galleries galore, restaurants by the hundred, a vibrant nightlife in the more ‘Bohemian’ areas, extensive parks, and much else. I found the award-winning House of Terror (Terror Háza Múzeum) a particularly affecting experience, located in the actual building where torture and executions were carried out by the secret police during the Soviet era.
Soviet tank on display at the House of Terror.
Much more uplifting is Hungarian food and drink, as excellent in quality as it is inexpensive; two of us could expect to pay about 8,000 forints (£20 or €25) for a three course dinner with wine, but we often paid quite a lot less. I was particularly delighted with the city’s main nightlife peculiarity, the ruin pubs, dilapidated buildings on the Pest side of the river that have been converted into trendy and idiosyncratic bars.
Szimpla Kert, one of Budapest’s ruin pubs.
In a short blog post there is little chance of giving a real flavour of a city of this size, and my intention has merely been to arouse the reader’s interest. I can heartily recommend Budapest to anyone with an interest in European culture, customs and art, as it is so different to that found in most other capitals. As for Bartok, I was lucky enough to visit the house where the great man lived and worked during the 1930s, now a public museum and a testament to his music, and as distinctively Hungarian as the rest of this magical city.