Szabadság Tér

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Independence Square, one of the largest in the city, is a few minutes' walk northeast of Roosevelt tér. In the centre is a memorial to the Soviet army, one of the very few still left in Budapest. At the eastern side of the square is the fortress-like US Embassy backing onto Hold utca (Moon St). This street, until 1990, was named Rosenberg házaspár utca (Rosenberg Couple St) after the American husband and wife Julius and Ethel Rosenberg who were executed as communist spies in the USA in 1953.

It was here that Cardinal József Mindszenty sought refuge after the 1956 Uprising and stayed for 15 years until departing for Vienna in 1971. Cardinal József Mindszenty, born József Pehm in the village of Csehimindszent near Szombathely in 1892, was politically active from the time of his ordination in 1915. Imprisoned under the short-lived regime of communist Béla Kun in 1919 and again when the fascist Arrow Cross came to power in 1944, Mindszenty was made archbishop of Esztergom (and thus primate of Hungary) in 1945 and cardinal the following year.

When the new cardinal refused to secularise Hungary's Roman Catholic schools under the new communist regime in 1948, he was arrested, tortured and sentenced to life imprisonment for treason. Released during the 1956 Uprising, Mindszenty took refuge in the US embassy on Szabadság tér when the communists returned to power. There he would remain until 1971.

As relations between the Kádár regime and the Holy See began to thaw in the late 1960s, the Vatican made several requests for the cardinal to leave Hungary, which he refused to do. Following the intervention of US president Richard Nixon, Mindszenty left for Vienna, where he continued to criticise the Vatican's relations with the regime in Hungary. He retired in 1974 and died the following year. But as he had vowed not to return to Hungary until the last Russian soldier had left Hungarian soil, Mindszenty's remains were not returned until May 1991. This was actually several weeks before that pivotal date.