Monument sights in Budapest
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A
Raoul Wallenberg Memorial
A statue called the Serpent Slayer in honour of Raoul Wallenberg by Pál Pátzay stands in XIII Szent István Park. Of all the 'righteous gentiles' honoured by Jews around the world, the most revered is Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat and businessman who rescued as many as 35,000 Hungarian Jews during WWII.
Wallenberg, who came from a long line of bankers and diplomats, began working in 1936 for a trading firm whose president was a Hungarian Jew. In July 1944 the Swedish Foreign Ministry, at the request of Jewish and refugee organisations in the USA, sent the 32-year-old Wallenberg on a rescue mission to Budapest as an attaché to the embassy there. By that time, al…
reviewed
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B
Memento Park
Home to almost four dozen statues, busts and plaques of Lenin, Marx, Béla Kun and ‘heroic’ workers such as have ended up on trash heaps in other former socialist countries, the recently renamed Memento Park, 10km southwest of the city centre, is a mind-blowing place to visit. Ogle the socialist realism and try to imagine that at least four of these monstrous relics were erected as recently as the late 1980s; a few, including the Béla Kun memorial of our ‘hero’ in a crowd by fence-sitting sculptor Imre Varga were still in place when this author moved to Budapest in early 1992. New attractions here are the replicated remains of Stalin’s boots, all that was left after a crow…
reviewed
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C
Timewheel
The Timewheel in ‘Procession Sq’ on the park’s western edge and directly behind the Palace of Art is the world’s largest hourglass, standing 8m high and weighing in at 60 tonnes. Unveiled on 1 May 2004 to commemorate Hungary’s entry into the EU, it provocatively stands a short distance from the parade grounds of Dózsa György út, where communist honchos once stood to watch May Day processions and where the 25m-tall statue of Joseph Stalin was pulled down by demonstrators on the first night of the 1956 Uprising. The ‘sand’ (actually grass granules) flows from the upper to lower chamber for one year, finishing exactly at midnight on New Year’s Eve, when the wheel is reset to…
reviewed
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D
Millenary Monument
In the centre of Hősök tere there is a 36m-high pillar backed by colonnades to the right and left. Topping the pillar is the Angel Gabriel, who is holding the Hungarian crown and a cross. At the base are Árpád and the six other Magyar chieftains who occupied the Carpathian Basin in the late 9th century. The 14 statues in the colonnades are of rulers and statesmen: from King Stephen on the left to Lajos Kossuth on the right. The four allegorical figures atop are (from left to right) : Work and Prosperity; War; Peace; Knowledge and Glory.
reviewed
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E
Shoes on the Danube
A monument to Hungarian Jews shot and thrown into the Danube by members of the fascist Arrow Cross Party in 1944, Shoes on the Danube is by sculptor Gyula Pauer and film director Can Togay. It’s a simple affair – 60 pairs of old-style boots and shoes in cast iron, tossed higgledy-piggledy on the bank of the river – but it is one of the most poignant monuments yet unveiled in this city of so many tears.
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F
Independence Monument
The charming lady with the palm frond proclaiming freedom throughout the city from atop Gellért Hill was erected in 1947 in tribute to the Soviet soldiers who died liberating Budapest in 1945. If you walk west for a few minutes along Citadella sétány north of the fortress, you'll come to what is arguably the best vantage point in Budapest.
reviewed
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G
Statue Of Elizabeth
North of Elizabeth Bridge and through the underpass is a statue of Elizabeth, the Habsburg empress and Hungarian queen and the consort of Franz Joseph much beloved by Magyars because, among other things, she learned to speak Hungarian. Sissi, as she was affectionately known, was assassinated by an Italian anarchist in Geneva in 1898.
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H
St Gellért Monument
Looking down on Elizabeth Bridge (Erzsébet híd) from Gellért Hill is the St Gellért monument, an Italian missionary invited to Hungary by King Stephen to convert the natives. The monument marks the spot from where the bishop was hurled to his death in a spiked barrel in 1046 by pagan Hungarians resisting the new faith.
reviewed
