Bounding to Budapest

As of today, I can add another place to the list of cities and countries I’ve visited: Budapest, Hungary.

Budapest seems like a natural destination choice for me. I’ve been to Asia a few times over the past few years and visited several Buddhist temples there. That takes care of the Buda part, spelling notwithstanding. And many people who know me call me a pest. They don’t usually say it to my face, but I know they’re thinking it. So, I should feel comfortable in Budapest.

And I’m often hungry. So, the country works for me too.

If those excruciatingly pathetic puns make you want to stop reading, I understand. But I’ll be sorry to see you go. So please leave while I’m not looking.

In truth, I’ve been thinking about Budapest as a travel destination for a few years, mainly because the pictures I’ve seen of it look gorgeous. However, I’ve been wary about going to a country with an autocrat, Viktor Orbán, as its prime minister. I want to thank the people of Hungary deeply and sincerely for resolving that issue. And here I am.

(Air Canada recently initiated a nonstop flight between Toronto and Budapest, which also helped make the decision easier.)

I’ll be in Budapest for eight nights before heading to some other places in Hungary. I’ll then return to Budapest for one night ahead of catching my flight back home.

Before getting into it, I feel the need to admit to something embarrassingly ignorant on my part. Painfully so. Until I started putting this trip together, I had absolutely no idea that Budapest is composed of two formerly independent cities: Buda and Pest, on opposite sides of the Danube River. I thought that Budapest was a name unto itself, not a mash-up of two components. Am I the only person in the world who didn’t know that? Why didn’t anyone tell me?

I arrived at my hotel at about 11:30 a.m., which gave me plenty of time to see some sights today.

My room wasn’t ready when I arrived So I checked my bags and headed to the nearby St. Stephen’s Basilica.

St. Stephen’s Basilica

Both of my guidebooks and my walking tour app recommend St. Stephen’s Basilica as a must-see. One of my guidebooks uses an anglicized version of the Hungarian name, with the true Hungarian name in parentheses, St. István’s Basilica (Szent István Bazilika), but the English pages of the basilica’s website call it St. Stephen’s Basilica, as do my other two sources, so that’s the name I’m going with.

It was designed in a neoclassical style, with the emphasis on neo. The basilica is relatively new for a grand, old European cathedral. Work started on it in 1851, but it wasn’t completed until 1891.

The lengthy construction period resulted from a mishap. A year after the basilica’s designer, József Hild, died, the dome collapsed. Another architect, Miklós Ybl, was brought in to correct the design flaws and redesign the entire structure, including adding some Renaissance-style elements.

The basilica has a large dome, two tall towers on the two sides at the front of the building and a smaller tower off to the side toward the back. The back of the basilica is semicircular.

When I was there, one of the two front towers was surrounded by scaffolding and shrouded because, of course, it was. Although I must say that the Budapest branch of the DLJSSIA (Don’t Let Joel See Stuff International Association) hasn’t proven itself terribly ardent so far. None of the interior was blocked off today. Most DLJSSIA branches close down whole buildings or at least large interior sections when I’m in town. None of the interior of St. Stephen’s Basilica was closed. Then again, I have only just arrived in Budapest. I might run into more of their handiwork in the coming days.

Inside, St. Stephen’s Basilica is resplendently decorated, with numerous sculptures, paintings, gilding, and stained-glass windows.

From 1897, the basilica has borne the name of Hungary’s first king, Saint Stephen. I got that information from an app that I downloaded via a QR code in the basilica. I hate to be a stickler (that’s a lie; I love to be a stickler), but I doubt he was considered to be a saint while he was king. I admit to having little to no knowledge in this area, but don’t saints have to shuffle off their mortal coils before being honoured with sainthood? And, I might also be wrong about this, too, but I think most kingdoms insist that people possess mortal coils before they can even apply for, let alone serve in, the position of king. But, never mind that. It’s inane. I blame my foolish sticklerhood on my jet lag.

The basilica honours St Stephen with lots of images of him, and few of Jesus. But it also particularly honours St. Stephen’s right hand. That’s not a typo. I don’t mean his right-hand man. I mean his right hand.

Inside the basilica, there’s a beautiful box that’s shaped like a small, one-room dollhouse. It’s a mostly glass miniature building with a peaked roof and gold framing. (I don’t know if it’s real gold, but probably so.) The whole thing sits inside a glass case. Inside the glass dollhouse is St. Stephen’s mummified right hand. His real right hand.

The containing glass case is set back a little behind some ropes. So I couldn’t get too close. But, zooming past the optical zoom range of my iPhone camera, I was able to make out the fingers of the saint’s hand clearly.

Then again, I’m only taking their word for it that it’s the saint’s hand. For all I know, the church could have greased some mortician’s palm in return for cutting off the hand of any old schlemiel for use in the reliquary. Or, if grease isn’t sufficient because, let’s face it, how much sordidness would someone be willing to commit for only grease? If that didn’t work, they’d probably have to slip the mortician some cash to turn over a palm or, better yet, the whole hand.

Did I mention that jet lag makes me inane? That’s the excuse I’m going with for the days on or shortly after overseas travel. If you give me time, I’ll come up with an equally bogus excuse for the rest of my inanity.

But enough about that.

I said St. Stephen’s Basilica has a dome. It’s stately from the exterior and beautifully decorated inside. It also has a walkway that wraps around the dome’s exterior near its top. For an additional fee (yes, there’s a fee for tourists to enter St. Stephen’s Basilica), you can go up there. More relevant to this journal entry, not only can you go up there, but I can, too. And I did.

The views of Budapest from up there are splendid.

Views from the walkway around the dome of St. Stephen's Basilica

Budapest Rambling

Once I left St. Stephen’s Basilica, it was well into what’s normally my lunchtime. Mealtimes are sacred, so having just come from a religious institution, I felt it would be wrong to blaspheme by skipping lunch. I’d been fed heartily on the plane and, before that, in the airport lounge (please don’t hate me for my lounge access), so I wasn’t particularly hungry. I craved just a sandwich. Google Maps helped me to find a suitable establishment near the basilica.

After lunch, it still wasn’t yet time to get my room, so I wandered around Budapest for a while. It didn’t start as random rambling. I usually like cities’ water geographic features. In Budapest, that’s the Danube River.

I didn’t ask a mapping app for a preferred route to a point on the river. Instead, I looked at Apple Maps to see where the river was relative to my position and headed in that direction.

It was a reasonable straight line to the river and not terribly far. As I said, I didn’t ask the map for a direct route. So I was shocked and pleased that I found the Danube. I can get lost traversing an empty, square room.

The Danube wasn’t quite what I was expecting. I presumed it would be blue. It’s not. It’s closer to a pea soup colour, possibly with just a soupçon of paprika thrown into the soup mix.

I entirely blame Johann Strauss Jr. for my false expectation of a Blue Danube. It’s disappointing because, to the best of my knowledge, Strauss never lied to me before.

Today, I stayed on the Pest side of Budapest, which is the side my hotel is on. Most of the bank I walked along on the Pest side was parked up with river cruise ships and boats for short and long cruises. I also saw a couple of permanently docked boats that serve as restaurants and bars.

From what I saw from my side, there were few, if any, boats berthed on the Buda bank.

I arrive at the Danube near a beautiful faux-old bridge, the Chain Bridge. Before its opening in 1849, no bridges crossed the Danube in Budapest. Before then, residents had to use ferries to cross between Buda and Pest. That’s much more recent than, say, medieval or Renaissance vintage, but that’s not why I called it faux-old.

I gave it that descriptor because what’s there now is not the original. The Germans blew it up during World War II when they retreated from Budapest. The city then lovingly rebuilt and reopened the bridge in 1949.

It’s still too early in this trip for me to be definitive, but so far, I’m impressed with my wandering around central Budapest. There are a couple of streets that are too wide and busy with fast traffic, but for the most part, they’re narrower, quieter and have lots of interesting shops and restaurants. Plus, at least a couple of them are enjoyable pedestrianized streets.

I also passed and passed through some pleasant public squares.

The buildings are mostly mid-rise. They’re mostly somewhat oldish, but well-maintained.

After some roaming, it was time to head back to my hotel, claim my room, and “freshen up” before heading out to take in one more sight today. In truth, I thought I’d take in two or three more sights, but I spent much longer at the first one than I imagined I would.

House of Terror

Upon reading “House of Terror” in the section heading immediately above, you might have had the same reaction I had when I saw the name attached to a sight recommended by both of my guidebooks and my walking tour app.

I thought it was going to be some sort of standalone theme-park-style experiential adaptation of the horror film genre.

Fortunately, I eventually read past the name to the descriptions. That’s not what it is. At all.

The House of Terror is a legitimate and very serious museum. It examines two almost consecutive occupations of Budapest, first by Nazi Germany and then, shortly after World War II, by the Soviet communists.

Having said that, one difference between the House of Terror and a traditional museum is that it doesn’t have all that many historical artifacts. Instead, the museum presents the events, atrocities, personal stories, and other aspects of those occupations through several videos, along with a few tableaus, paintings, and, yes, a small number of artifacts from that period. Some of the videos present just images. The videos with audio tracks have English subtitles.

There are no exhibits on the ground floor. Instead, I was instructed to start on the second floor. (They use standard European floor numbering here, i.e., the ground floor is zero, the next one up is one, then two, etc.) Then visitors go down to the first floor. After that, they take an elevator to the basement, before walking back up to the ground floor to leave.

The exhibits on the second and first floors are in a series of connected rooms around a small atrium. (The walls between the rooms and the atrium are opaque, but the atrium is visible on the ground floor and from the entrance to the ring of rooms on each floor above it.) That atrium has an old tank on the ground floor and pictures of victims of the occupations on two tall walls.

When I said that visitors take an elevator from the first floor to the basement, I didn’t mean that an elevator was one option for getting there. The elevator is very much a part of the museum’s exhibits. The elevator has a decent capacity. Its walls are glass. And it may, intentionally, be one of the slowest elevators I’ve ever been on. And I’ve been on some slow elevators.

Once the doors close and the elevator starts descending, the lights in the elevator go out, and a video plays on a screen behind the back glass wall. The audio of the video is in Hungarian, but like the videos elsewhere in the museum, there are English subtitles. The video was of one person giving a first-hand account of his time in a Soviet-era detention facility. The job he was forced to do was to clean the gallows room after executions. He describes the tortures and executions, including the particularly brutal methods used to hang prisoners.

The basement of the museum is a recreation of a basement that was used for brutal detentions, interrogations, torture, and executions during the Soviet occupation of Hungary. That dungeon became too small as the barbaric operations of the force running it (I’ve forgotten the force’s name) increased. So they took over neighbouring buildings and expanded the basement detention centre into those other buildings. I don’t know if it was just the original building or the subsequent aglomeration, but it became known as the House of Terror. Hence the museum name.

When I entered the House of Terror, I opted to rent a very informative electronic audioguide, which offered narrations for each of the rooms. I spent more than an hour and a half in the museum.

I knew very little about either of those occupations in Budapest before visiting the House of Terror Museum. I know more now. At the risk of being too trite by several orders of magnitude, I feel the need to say that over the course of history, and still today, some humans have proven themselves to be horrifically inhumane. If it wouldn’t be too much trouble, please stop that.

That wasn’t the most joyful way to end my first day in Budapest, but it probably needed to be done.