Reclining Buda

25.10.2019 - 25.10.2019
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I don't know why, but I have long had a fascination with communism since childhood. I did much of my growing up in the shadow of the Cold War, the Berlin Wall fell when I was eleven, and a very large proportion of TV, radio and print news coverage in Australia was devoted to communist countries and the relations between the West and those countries. I guess spending much of my childhood watching news repprts about the Reagan-Gorbachev summit on National Nine News or reading about Nicolae Ceaucescu's crimes against humanity in the Daily Mirror led me to wonder with childish curioisity about what life really was like on the other side of the Iron Curtain.

So it shouldn't be a surprise that my first visit on a gloriously sunny Friday in Budapest was to Memento Park. This large park on the southwestern industrial outskirts of Budapest is home to the biggest collection of communist kitsch in the world. A ride on the M4 metro line to Kelenföld then a bus brought me to this eccentric collection of sculptures, friezes, murals and statues.

Like in all communist countries, town centres across Hungary were filled with statues of communist leaders and sculptures of striving labourers with bulging muscles and determined faces giving one hundred and ten percent of their energy to building the brave new socialist world to come. These were all produced in the Socialist Realism style, all chunky concrete and blocky brass. When communism fell in 1989, the authorities were left with the dilemma of what to do with these now politically incorrect adornments. Some bright spark hit upon the idea of dumping them on some waste ground on Budapest's outskirts squeezed between arterial roads clogged with trucks and high-voltage transmission lines. And thus was Memento Park born.

The usual suspects were well-represented - Lenin with arm raised, Marx and Engels with flowing beards, Red Army soldiers with bayonets fixed, countless aforementioned labourers, Bela Kun who led a short-lived communist regime in Hungary in 1919 - but the most striking item in the collection was an enormous pair of brass boots. These once belonged to Comrade Stalin, or rather, to a statue thereof. A statue of Stalin of truly titanic proportions graced one of Budapest's central squares until revolutionaries in the 1956 uprising managed to saw through the statue at the ankles and pull Stalin down, leaving only his footwear. Stalin's boots take pride of place on a huge podium at Memento Park.

Outside the entrance there is a small museum about the communist history of Hungary as well as a small cinema showing a constant loop of 1950s training films for new employees of ÁVH, the secret police. The films instructed recruits on the proper way to conduct a raid. In the films the ÁVH officers were polite and solicitous towards their suspects, which I am sure was not really the case. Perhaps the most unsettling film was the one where they taught rookies about how to obtain the apartment keys of suspects. The suspect would be given a fake notice to attend a fake medical screening. The suspect would attend the fake clinic, would take their clothes off, and the ÁVH officer would then rifle the pockets to find the keys, impress them into wax moulds, and then put the keys back in the pocket. The moulds would then be used to cut copies of the key so ÁVH could enter the apartment at will whenever the suspect was out of house.

I caught the bus back to Kelenföld station and then a tram to Clark Ádám Square at the western end of the Széchenyi Chain Bridge. The square lies at the bottom of a nineteenth century funicular railway that hauls passengers up to Buda Castle. The short ride with great views over the Danube and Pest on the eastern bank brought me to the castle grounds. It's not really a castle, but a whole town surrounded by ramparts on the ridge of a kilometre-long hill. It makes Prague Castle look tiny.

The most prominent building in the castle is at the southern end, the magnificent domed Royal Palace, formerly the modest little cottage of the Habsburg family but now home to the Hungarian National Museum. Along the edges of the ridge are ramparts, most of which are open to the public, along with watchtowers and bastions. The most famous is the Fisherman's Bastion which looks mediaeval but was only built in the nineteenth century, along with the Matthias Church next to it, which looks impressively ancient and Gothic but most of which was comprehensively rebuilt in the late nineteenth century.

The northern half of the castle is still a functional neighbourhood with houses and shops and restaurants and government departments and buses. It is in this neighbourhood that I visited the Labyrinth, a network of caves under Buda Castle that was transformed by mediaeval stonemasons into cellars and store rooms for the Hungarian royal household.

Labyrinth is now just a common tourist trap. You climb down the steep stairs, pay your admission fee, and then find yourself walking down stone-lined tunnels with waxworks depicting opera scenes, marble busts of Hungarian kings, a prison cell with heads on pikes representing Dracula's victims, sinister music and spraying mist jets. It's all very kitsch, it makes Memento Park look like the Louvre.

I continued walking around the ramparts, admiring the sunset over Buda. Despite being in the heart of the city, Buda Castle's great height above the Danube and its plains give the impression that this neighbourhood is a separate place, in Budapest but not of it. The peak-hour traffic jams on the bridges and boulevards were just pulsating twinkling lights; distant, barely audible ribbons of white and red.

It was my last night in Budapest. I checked out St Stephen's Basilica in Pest, the most important church in Hungary, rode the last two sections of the Budapest Metro I had not yet clinched, and headed to Erzsébetváros, the historic home of Budapest's Jewish community and now also the hipster nightlife district. The Jewish community of Erzsébetváros suffered greatly in the Holocaust after the Arrow Cross party formed a Nazi puppet government in the dying stages of World War Two. The community is now thankfully thriving. It is thriving so much that I saw an Orthodox Jewish man in his black hat and bushy beard and curly sideburns getting around Erzsébetváros on a skateboard. It was Shabbat evening so perhaps skateboards are the fastest kosher way of getting around.

Budapest is famous for its ruin bars. Budapest has a large number of abandoned, boarded-up buildings. Enterprising, free-spirited young souls have decided to liberate these premises from abandonment without the leave of their official owners and have set up pubs, dance floors and live music venues in these rotting edifices. These illicit venues have thrived and are now an integral part of Budapest's culture.

I went to the biggest and most famous ruin bar, Szimpla Kert (Simple Garden), in the heart of Erzsébetváros's nightlife precinct. I waited forever in a line, got a full-body pat-down by security, had my bag searched and was forced to dispose of my bottle of water, then went into a graffiti covered courtyard with ten thousand other people. Most of them appeared to be lager louts from the United Kingdom - loud, jeering, obnoxious boors guzzling generic European pale lagers as if the world's beer supply were to be cut off permanently tomorrow. You would think that beer was unavailable in Billericay and Basildon and Burnley judging by these uncouth Brits. Do you want to know why Australia has such a terrible problem with binge drinking and alcohol-fuelled violence and disorderly behaviour in our towns and cities on Friday and Saturday nights? It's because we inherited that culture from the British and the vast majority of Australians are of British ancestry.

I then spent half an hour waiting at one of the many bars dotted around the perimeter of the courtyard to be served a one thousand forint glass of beer - two to three times the price of everywhere else. And to add insult to injury, the beer was served in a plastic cup.

I then went into a side room where there was an open mic session that may as well have been karaoke, so abysmal was the quality of the performers. I then went out into the courtyard to finish my beer only to be bumped into by a hundred ruddy-faced drunken gits from the dreary satellite towns of the Home Counties.

So I finished my beer as quickly as I could, said "f@#$ this for a joke" to myself and walked a kilometre or two back to where I was staying. Just down the street from my room is the little corner pub I've been to a few times during my stay, Roots, owned by the aspiring musician who is a massive fan of Australian indie rock. It sure as hell beats Szimpla Kert. I fell into conversation with a Hungarian, György, who had lived in the United Kingdom for many years and spoke good English and, like many expatriate Hungarians, had learned to open up and not be so mistrustful of strangers. He was still Hungarian - very no-nonsense, very abrupt, very little visible emotional affect - but just to crack the ice a bit and talk with a stranger is something that is uncommon among the people here.

György is a builder and was back in Hungary visiting friends and family. We had a wide-ranging conversation about politics, culture, finance, history. This is what I love about Europe the most - just how easy it is to have an intelligent conversation here. Australians are not dumb. You don't build one of the world's most successful economies and stable democracies by being a bunch of morons. Australians may not be dumb but they are anti-intellectual. There's a shallowness to Australian culture that can be unsatisfying. There is not much chance that I could meet a construction worker in a typical pub in Sydney and have a conversation that went much further beyond sport, chicks, fast cars and casual racism. Australian brains tend not to plunge too deeply into subjects beyond the merely pragmatic.

György and I talked about communism in Hungary. He was about my age and so had plenty of childhood memories of the last decade of communism. "We weren't as bad off as other countries. There was plenty of food in the markets. Most families had a small car - a Trabant or a Polski, we were given a free flat because my father worked at a truck factory. You could have an OK life here. But if you wanted anything more than that very basic life - you couldn't have it unless you were a member of the corrupt elite."

György mentioned that at the very end of communism, nobody did any work. "The whole economy stopped. Nobody did anything. Why bother? If you were doing an exam at a university, and everybody got sixty percent regardless of how well they did, would you bother studying?" As someone who was addicted to getting high distinctions (the highest possible grade at Australian universities) when I did my degree in surveying and spatial information, I could relate to this wholeheartedly.

"So capitalism isn't working. Communism didn't work. What's the answer, do you reckon?" I asked.

"Search me. If I knew the answer I'd be a politician. Capitalism is terrible and has many problems and needs to be fixed, but communism was never the answer."

The conversation turned to cars - I am fascinated by Trabants and I drove a Trabi in Berlin in 2017. I talked about my first car, a 1983 Holden Camira, the biggest shitbox ever to have been produced out of the many shitboxes produced by Australia's now-dead car industry. I did a Google Images search for a 1983 Holden Camira and showed György and his friends some photos of what my first car looked like.

"If you had driven a car like that in Hungary in the 1980s, you would have been surrounded by a thousand girls wanting to marry you!" György said and I laughed, trying to imagine a Holden Camira ever being a chick magnet and failing miserably.

It was time to call an end to my last night in Budapest. I farewelled György and farewelled Roots and shook the hands of the owner and wished him all the best.

Memento Park