Belated Budapest Blogpost

Arriving at Budapest Keleti

My trip to Budapest was already a month ago, undertaken with my mother and sister. And (obviously) I haven't written about it yet. It's not just that I don't feel I really got to know the city; it's that, more strongly than in any other place I've visited, I was acutely conscious of being an outsider in it. It trumpets its history everywhere, in architecture stately and extravagant, in statues of sentimental 19th-century curves and starkly aspiring Soviet lines. And in a city with a history as long, as complicated, as laden with conflict and oppression and resistance as that of Budapest, that made my historian's hairs stand on end; Shakespeare's fretful porcupine came to mind. This was all complicated by the fact that, as a tourist, I found myself thoroughly seduced. The city is beautiful, Buda on its fortified and palace-crowned hill, Pest spreading elegantly out on the edge of unending plains. Narrow lanes and elegant boulevards, the vast Danube, decaying apartment blocks and well-kept parks; all these I loved. And yet.

The Parliament buildings

The imposing display architecture created in 1896, on the 1000th anniversary of the nation's mythical founding, provides most of the central city with its facade, especially on the Pest side. Maybe this is part of what made me uneasy: that the most prominent buildings were these grand, romantic fin-de-siècle creations celebrating a self-created narrative in which warriors succeeded each other in a triumphant row, in which natural phenomena and supernatural portents confirmed their rights to this land, in which, as age succeeded age, diplomats successfully obtained the seal of these rights in law, and foreign emperors sought the aid of this untamed, united people. It makes Budapest a beautiful city to wander around in… and a deeply unsettling one. It also made me actively look out for views not designed to promote such a narrative:

Shoe shop, sale and repair

In the former Jewish quarter

Trams over 20 years old

The central vegetable market

A shabby apartment building on Andrássy út

It's a beautiful city. It's also a city that thinks and speaks and sings and remembers in a language so foreign that I felt like a terrified child reciting a memorized poem when I tried to speak it. An avuncular waiter said I spoke "a very clean Hungarian," but I kept my pocket dictionary anxiously clutched, thumbing it through repeatedly to assure myself of phrases I couldn't keep in my mind, even ones as simple as "We'd like a bottle of water." It's a language that is itself loved and celebrated by those who know it, and used to tell many more complex and beautiful stories about Hungary's past and present than are told by the capital's architecture. I spent several hours wandering through bookstores admiring these volumes, and reading a book of poetry with a parallel German translation, while my mother and sister, more courageously, visited a museum concerning Budapest's history through occupations and revolutions from the late 1930s to the fall of the USSR. (I spent the walk to the museum feeling sicker and sicker, burst into tears in its shadow, and almost literally ran away from the planned visit.) It's a beautiful city. We heard a world-class orchestra there; we spent a day at a neo-baroque spa; we spent hours walking its streets. We stayed in a large room with a faded Turkish carpet, in a pension run by a former diplomat and his wife. "We're a very pessimistic people," said Lászlo to me one morning, "we like being melancholy about things." And then he winked at me, and poured me another cup of his very excellent coffee. With such paradoxes Budapest haunts me, and with views like this: