Budapest road trip

The Trip
Getting there
Budapest is one of the most easily reachable Central European cities. Just ten hours drive northeast of Florence and two hours from Vienna, it is linked by good highways as well as by train. As we were staying for a week, we made a road trip (from Florence) out of it, spending 2 days in the Friuli region of Italy before reaching our final destination (see the page on Pordenone). This trip was taken December, 2005.

Post-Communist Budapest
For me the most visible aspect of “Westernization” in Budapest is the omnipresence of worldwide brands.

Since the fall of the wall in 1989, Hungary and other “eastern” countries have been the targets of companies looking to expand in a new market. You can now get anything in Hungary, though prices (in forints) are at par with Euro prices in the rest of Europe, while salaries are not. The main drag boasts Max Mara and Escada, but you don’t see anyone wearing that stuff; the locals prefer the huge malls popping up in the burbs. The upcropping of “western-style” hotels has made tourism a major business here, and they have quickly learned to charge entry fees to everything, though they tend to be rather low by most standards (1-2 euros). As areas are becoming gentrified, the clean-up of buildings has been slowly taking place, though many home-owners prefer to fix the inside of apartments but leave the outside in ruin. It is amazing that so much of the beautiful architecture in Budapest lies in the ruin of only 50 years: white buildings are blackened with dirt that looks as if it were accumulated over half a milennium. On the other hand, when given the opportunity, the Hungarians appear to be marvellously clean. In museums, theatres and concert halls, cleaning staff are omnipresent, and bathrooms everywhere are spotless, especially if they are newly rennovated. Budapest is clearly a city in transition, and it will have to be seen what changes will come as they continue their EU integration.

Crappy cars

Just 6 years ago, one saw many more “eastern block” cars on the road inBudapest. Now, trabants are rather rare, and all the common european brands whip by as in any other city. Locals say the traffic is terrible and that driving is very scary. This is relative — if you’ve driven in Rome or Sicily, Hungary is nothing. Budapest residents claim that their yellow line subway is the oldest in europe. The photo shows that is rather squarish and old looking, and the man inside doesn’t look too happy about it.

Guide Books
The best newest guide: Visible Cities Budapest
The quirkiest guide: Andras Torok’s Budapest: A critical Guide
The most complete but dry: The Blue Guide Hungary

Getting around by public transportation
Bus and subway tickets can be purchased at subway stations. There are machines that only take coins, and ticket windows with inevitably long lines. Most staff know enough english to recognize what kind of ticket you are asking for if you use the proper term, but no more. For every part of your voyage, no matter how short that part may be (ie, one stop on the blue line and then 3 on the yellow), you must validate a new ticket. The “single ticket” can only be used for one portion. You can buy a “transfer ticket” if you need to take two types of transportation. There are also 3 and 7 day passes available which are a good deal.

Language
They say that Hungarian is a language to itself. Knowing latin or any other latin-based languages won’t help here, where you really cannot guess what anything says. In tourist areas some people you will find will speak English. At the central market we found a butcher who knew some German. Our one attempt to buy vegetables in a non-tourist area required lots of pointing, and we are quite sure we were overcharged, but politely said “koszonom”, thank-you, our first acquired word. Our vocabulary increased at the impressive rate of about a word a day.

Hungarian Food

Fried food, goulash and salami? I don’t mean to be reductive, but this is not a country for vegetarians or dieters!! “Light” and “salad” are words that tend to be foreign to restaurants, where eating out is taken seriously. Cafe’s serve almost exclusively elaborate and heavy sweets and cakes. We ate most of our meals in our apartment. We were helped with food shopping by our Hungarian cousins, who showed us that vegetables and fruits are bought usually at smaller separate stores, and everything else at small supermarkets. Large supermarket chains with more variety are also cropping up. We visited in December and found the selection to be rather seasonally limited. There were lots of root vegetables and oranges. By the end of our stay, were were happy never to see cheese and salami again, although we did bring home a long paprika salami weighing one kilo.

 
The main market
The market is the place where all tourists should go to purchase salami to take home (within the EU of course!). Otherwise you can pack your suitcase full of paprika. The floors are remarkably clean and the market does not smell bad as one might expect.

 

Artistic Observations

Impressions of a plaster city
Budapest is a city built quickly, during a few spectacular years of wealth, ca 1880 to 1900. Hungarian architects of this period, forced to put up spectacular buildings overnight, became masters of stucco and plaster work, which covered homey brick bases. Buildings were never plain during this period, but always featured some kind of interesting decoration. Colourful ceramics were also used, especially under the direction of the Secessionist architect Odon Lechner (1845-1914), and while these have often retained their original splendour, most of the other architectural elements of the city have suffered years of neglect. WWII did not destroy the city as badly as one would think. It is only after the second world war, when Hungary became a communist state, that the city’s architecture suffered. The violent peoples’ revolution of 1956 caused much damage, including bullet holes that can sometimes be spotted still dotting facades. In the 50’s and 60’s, many of the previous century’s large, beautiful buildings were divided up into horrible apartment units. As the need for practical housing grew, communist apartment blocks went up, devoid of any decoration or elements considered unnecessary. The 19th-century buildings fell into neglect and accumulated dirt. The plaster started to fall off, revealing brick skeletons, but there was no money nor desire, it seems, to fix them. After 1989 some restoration programs have taken place, but the city is still a fascinating mix of styles and contrasts.

Architecture: some Secessionist facades and other periods

My favourite period by far is the Austro-Hungarian answer to Art Nouveau, called Secession (also visible in Vienna). This style, whose major proponent was Odon Lechner, was (in Budapest) conceived of as being typically Hungarian, truly eastern, deriving from folk designs but incorporating eastern influences (possibly due to the long Turkish occupation of the country). But interesting also is the assortment of “historicist” styles, glances back to all periods of western art history, with imitations of gothic, baroque and classical art often mixed together anachronistically.

The seedy side: Ugly Budapest

It seems important to point out some examples of the more regular buildings or more normal looking streets — it is easy for a tourist to photograph 19th century buildings because this is what we are likely to find beautiful. But it is also historically interesting to document 1970’s apartment buildings and other, even earlier communist elements. Most of the latter have been removed from the city, as if removing communist sculpture (to a purpose-designed park in the suburbs) was enough to remove years of opression from peoples’ memories and years of accumulated dirt from the city’s buildings.

 

Matayas Church

This church is one of my favourite places in Budapest. The 13th century origins of this Gothic church may be found in a stone or two, but, after a series of occupations and other functions, the original structure of the building is all but obscure. In the late 19th century it was “restored” by the architect Frigyes Schulek, who finished it in 1896. Every surface in the interior of the church is entirely covered in colourful painted patterns by the artist Bertalan Szekely. The result is what I would call “Disneyland Gothic”: the patterns are supposedly of Gothic inspiration but also work in folk tradition, floral motifs and numerous disctinctly Art Nouveau elements. The church now houses the crown of St. Stephen, the country’s oldest treasure and also the most valuable. It is excellently presented in a dedicated room in the triforium (upstairs level), where there are explanatory signs in numerous languages. There is a small entry fee to the building (600 ft) which is well worth it for the excellent lighting and full access it provides.

The Decorative Arts Museum (Iparmuveszeti Museum)
The fabulous building built in 1872 by Odon Lechner, the prime architect of Budapest’s Secession movement, houses an impressive permanent collection of decorative arts modelled on that of London’s V+A. Unfortunately, for reasons completely obscure to the general public and even to museum staff, none of this collection is actually on display (and attempts to consult items in storage for study purposes are not well met). It is likely due to lack of funds. Temporary exhibitions are shown in some of the exhibition spaces. We saw an show on Zsolnay ceramics, decorative works produced from the late nineteenth century onwards in the southern Hungarian town of Pecs. While the company produced tea ware, vases and stuff, their work was considered particularly apt for architectural decoration, because of a special heat and cold resistant glaze. The decorative arts museum itself is ornamented with these ceramics, and there is a section of the exhibition dedicated to this, with some of the original plans exposed.

The building is an exciting example of decorative art in itself. A brick and stucco facade are topped by a green roof punctuated with domes. The domes have yellow pinnacles that stick out and give the impression that the building is constantly in movement, like it is dancing a jig. White floral plaques articulate the faux-stone architecture. The main door is located within a grand antichamber, where the movement calms down but you are affronted with a riot of colour and pattern. Brick and stone hold up a flower chaped ceramic ceiling of yellow and white, with a beautiful floral pattern. You are led up the staircase by a wacky yellow ceramic glazed handrail. Just inside the door, you look up into an irregular opening, three stories high, to a tiffany-type stained glass of most unusual shape, that plays with convex and concave curves. Beyond this darker section of the entrance hall, however, you are struck by the contrast of the light-filled white interior to the green and white exterior. The main exhibition spaces all look onto a central opening that is topped with a wrought iron and glass ceiling reminiscent of 19th century Paris. The white stucco interior was likely designed to provide a light and neutral backdrop to the museum’s colourful collection.

Photo Gallery