Chapter 11: Four days in Budapest

Well, this is a dilemma.

As I've somehow persevered with this project - I really didn't think I'd get this far - I've settled into what amounts to a formula. There's some silly gambit to open with that then segues clumsily into a chronicle of each day. I tell stories about the people I meet and about the things I've seen, and I sprinkle in some bad puns and observe the places I visit with an air of general bemusement. It seems to be working, but it relies on something that isn't necessarily reliable: I need to find things that are bemusing, meet people that are interesting and, for a story to really work, ideally something should go wrong and derail the plan a little too.

I had a very satisfying, rather too short time in Budapest. But bemusement was scarce, the interesting people were all staying somewhere else and it was only on the last day, when I developed a cold, that something went meaningfully wrong. So what to write about? I've wrestled with the question, searched for an angle, toyed with and rejected ideas, started and deleted intros. And I've realised I need to do something that's most out of character for me.

I'm going to talk about politics. 

First, though, I'm going to do something even more unusual and talk about food. Specifically, I'm going to talk about langos. Langos is perhaps the world's worst sounding super-food. Take some flatbread dough - enough for something the size of a small pizza, but twice as thick - and fry it, brush it with garlic, smother it in sour cream and bury it under a thick layer of grated cheese. The finished product is an unhealthy, unwieldy, impractical street food tour de force. The Greeks gave us democracy, the Italians gave us humanism, the French gave us liberty and Hungary gave us langos. I kept meaning to take photos, only to forget until I'd already started eating, so this is what most of a langos looks like:

I first discovered this bounty at approximately 9PM on February 8th, 2014. I know this with such precision because it was at the Canberra Multicultural Festival, on the night of the Griffith by-election. Because I'm a well-rounded individual with only a casual interest in politics I was out with a friend, and I was only checking the count for updates every three to five minutes or so. Labor held the seat, we found and destroyed Kevin Rudd's last horcrux and I discovered langos. It was a good night.

Until I arrived in Budapest, that Canberra langos was the one and only langos I'd ever eaten. There wasn't anywhere close to me that had it when I moved back to Melbourne, and when I decided that Budapest would be part of this trip eating this mystical street food of kings at its source was one of the highest priority items on the agenda. It loomed so large in my imagination of Budapest that when a cafe opened just two doors down from my apartment building, with a Hungarian menu that included langos, I couldn't bring myself to go in. It was tempting. So tempting. But I was only about three months away from my trip, and it felt like cheating for something so anticipated to be so easily obtained. So I waited for Budapest, and to make up for lost time I ate four of the things in four days. It might have marginally reduced my life expectancy, but it was worth it. 

These is, of course, much more to Budapest than langos. I didn't have any expectations of the city at all, but it reminds me of a slightly dishevelled Paris: once down on its luck, but making its way in the world after a big break. It has Paris' big wide boulevards and some of its grand architecture, especially on either side of the Danube:

One thing that Budapest has that Paris doesn't, though, are thermal baths, which were imported into Hungarian culture when it was occupied by the Ottoman Empire a few centuries ago. I've been lugging a pair of bathers around with me for the last seven weeks, but apart from a swim way back in Dubai, the only use they'd gotten was for wearing while I washed the rest of my clothes. In Hungary I made up for lost time. After visiting the zoo - a disappointment, to be frank - I went next door to the Szechenyi Baths. Unfortunately I neglected to take photos, but the building is close to a century old and ornately decorated inside and out. 

There are pools inside that range all the way from uncomfortably cold to scalding hot, and there's some sort of convoluted sequence and timeframe in which you're supposed to move from one to the other. I didn't come here to sit in cold water, though, so I rebelled and just soaked in the warmth for hours. After spending some time inside I moved to one of the outdoor pools, which was set at 38 degrees. After seven weeks on planes, in trains and sleeping on hostel beds it was delightful. I can move all my muscles again! 

I could have happily stayed in the pool for longer but - and how's this for logic - while the pools remained open until 10, the building that housed the change rooms and lockers closed at 7. If I wanted to stay longer I'd just have to entrust my wallet, phone and passport to the decency and integrity of a few hundred strangers: decency was also going to be hard to guarantee if I wanted to be able to change. So I begrudgingly left.

Now. Politics. 

Apart from a brief foray into Slovakia, Budapest was my first experience of post-Communist Europe, and given my interests this was always going to become a theme of the visit. I was curious to see how the legacy of the Communist period is remembered and represented. 

So what do you do when life gives you Lenins? You make a Lenin Park.

Memento Park is a tourist trap, devoted to Communist kitsch, situated a few kilometres outside the city. They've collected about 30 or so statues that were evicted from their original locations following the fall of the Communist regime, along with a Trabant for good measure. It's mostly Hungarian party officials and symbolic representations of workers and soldiers, but there's also three Lenins, such as this:

A larger than life Soviet soldier:

And Stalin's boots:

The boots are all that were left standing after Budapest's main statue of Stalin was torn down during the 1956 revolution. In the 2003 Hollywood adaptation of this event, American soldiers naturally take the place of Hungarian freedom fighters, and the statue being demolished was of Saddam Hussein. Stalin's hand and Stalin's ear, meanwhile, are in the Hungarian National Museum.

A rather more serious attempt to grapple with history is Terror House. It might sound like a cartoonish theme park attraction, but it's a genuinely horrifying museum devoted to documenting the history of totalitarian Hungary, ostensibly in both its fascist and Communist incarnations. The museum is built inside the former headquarters of the Arrow Cross - a Nazi party installed in power by the Germans in the dying days of World War II - and after that the building housed Hungary's equivalent of the KGB until 1956.

I am a social democrat. I believe in using the power of government to support the disadvantaged, to fight inequality and advance the interests of workers and the underclass. But I remember when Fidel Castro recently died and my reaction - satisfaction that a career criminal responsible for the death, imprisonment and exile of thousands was finally in the hatground - caught some people by surprise. I was surprised that they were surprised.  

At the end of World War II the Soviets issued quotas for people who would be kidnapped and marched back to the USSR as forced labourers. At Terror House you'll see videos of elderly men, recalling that as they were marching, those who were toothless or too small to fight for a share of the bread thrown on the ground in front of them starved to death. Or you can listen to their wives, left at home, often without ever being told where their husbands had disappeared to. The Hungarian Communist Party - supposedly a workers' movement - aided and abetted the enslavement of their own people. The regime murdered or forcibly evicted peasants who owned a little more land than their neighbours. They trained children to inform on their parents for thought crimes. They tortured people in search of confessions to crimes that didn't exist. They executed teenagers who fought in the 1956 revolution. I stood in the basement where they did it. 

If these people stood for anything it wasn't any ideal, value or principle that I share.

If Communism had been the only terror to befall Hungary in the 20th century I'd call it a wonderful, if devastating, museum. It pulls no punches. It even has a room that features names and photos of people who committed crimes against humanity and some of them, at least, were still alive when they were added to the wall of shame. But as I wrote above, while it 'ostensibly' covers both Communism and fascism, it gives remarkably short thrift to the latter. The museum almost exclusively covers the period from the fall of the Miklos Horthy regime in 1944 until the Communist political police moved out of the building. The Arrow Cross regime - the 'fascist' part of the museum - covers only three months of this time and takes up one room out of four floors. Very convenient.

Miklos Horthy was Regent - effectively dictator - of Hungary from 1920 until being deposed by the Nazis and replaced with the Arrow Cross Party, for trying to make a separate peace with the Allies. Under Horthy's regime Hungary allied with the Nazis, annexed parts of Czechoslovakia following the German invasion, and participated in the invasions of Yugoslavia and the USSR. The museum waves all this away as 'symbolic' actions to appease Hitler. As for the Holocaust, both the Terror House and the National Museum claim that Horthy 'resisted' sending Jews to the extermination camps. Partly true: they refused to surrender Jews who were Hungarian citizens until 1944, but sent 18,000 non-citizens - mostly refugees - to their deaths. And eventually Horthy did comply with Nazi demands to send Hungarian Jews too, handing over more than 400,000 people. 400,000. 

Why does this matter? Because past is prologue, and because the things we choose not to talk about, the inconvenient truths we don't want to tell, help determine the decisions we make and the actions we take. The current government of Hungary is of an authoritarian bent and the country is being described as an 'illiberal democracy': it still holds elections but the government is clamping down on judges and the press, and back-pedalling on human rights. 

The Prime Minister, Viktor Orban, is rather like a more competent, less preposterous version of Donald Trump, with a similar platform and eagerness to demonise foreigners. He is less dangerous only because he was born in Hungary and Trump was born in America. While it suits the government to highlight the crimes of Communism, Horthy's legacy is being rehabilitated. Statues and monuments to him have been popping up: hopefully one day they'll find their way to Memento Park too.

With all of this in the back of my mind, I left Terror House deeply upset not only by what it displayed, but what it didn't. How was a country that has all of this horror still within its living memory not learning from the past? How could it flirt with the same mistakes? But then I found some hope.

I stumbled upon this 'memorial' to the victims of German aggression on an aimless wander through the city:

Apologies for the crappy photo - the light was working against me. The eagle represents Germany, sinking its talons into an innocent Hungary represented, for reasons I don't pretend to understand, by the Archangel Gabriel. Erected by the Orban government, it's a classic of the 'playing the victim card'. That slur is usually deployed by the right to wave away any grievances of minorities that they'd prefer not to think about, but it's appropriate here because the purpose of this statue is to re-position Hungary as an innocent victim of World War II, rather than an Axis power that invaded neighbouring countries and committed war crimes against its own people.

So why did I find this monstrosity a sign of hope? Because I found this unofficial, unauthorised addition at its base:

Hungarian liberals have been conducting this protest ever since the memorial went up. The personal effects are mostly heirlooms from Holocaust victims: they are occasionally removed - stolen, effectively - but they keep replacing them. The protesters apparently hold vigils every night: I'd intended to attend one before I got sick. 

I'll finish my rant there. I shall return to general befuddlement and bemusement in Chapter 12, which features a mouse, a bottle of beer and toilet humour of the 'if you don't laugh, you'll cry' variety.