Category: Danube River Cruise, June 2023

The place is inarguably misnamed. When George Bush was asked during the presidential campaign of 2000, “Who is your favorite political philosopher?” he answered, “Jesus Christ.” The answer was clever but inappropriate. Jesus Christ was not a political philosopher; he was a religious leader. He is also one of the figures memorialized in the Budapest Garden of Philosophers (Filozófusok kertje in Hungarian), along with Abraham, Buddha, Laozi, and Akhenaten, Mohandas Gandhi, Daruma Daishi (aka Bodhidharma), and Saint Francis of Assisi, all of whom, with the possible exception of Gandhi, are considered religious leaders rather than philosophers.

But other than the name, the Philosophers’ Garden is a pleasant and edifying place, well worth a visit. It is located on Gellért Hill in Buda, and provides wonderful views of the city, not the least of the reasons for visiting. It’s also a great spot for picnickers, hikers and people who just want to amble around and meditate. Parking is very limited, and I have to commend our bus driver for his amazing parking job in fitting the bus into a space which seemed impossibly small for the vehicle.

The Garden was the brainchild of Hungarian sculptor Nándor Wagner (1922-1997), who emigrated from Hungary following the 1956 revolution and spent the rest of his life in Sweden and Japan. His intent in creating the Garden was to promote mutual understanding among the adherents of the world’s great religions.

The centerpiece of the garden is the ring of five statues surrounding a pool with a silver ball in the center, symbolizing the divine essence. The statues represent what Wagner saw as the founders of the world’s major religions. Why he would include the Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten, whose monotheism did not survive, and not Zoroaster and Mohammed, I have no idea. A second group of statues, representing three figures whom Wagner considered to be leaders in fostering spiritual enlightenment, stands in a row outside the first circle. Again, the choice of Gandhi, St. Francis and Daruma Daishi (founder of Zen, one of many schools or sects of Buddhism) seems entirely subjective and whimsical. Wagner planned a third group, consisting of great lawgivers (Hammurabi, Moses, Justinian, and Prince Shotoku of Japan), but he died of cancer before he could complete this project.

The statues have a certain Asian mien to them, perhaps a reflection of the fact that Wagner spent the last 25 years of his life living and working in Japan. Indeed, another version of the statue group was cast and installed in Nakano, Japan.

In April, 2007 thieves made off with the statues of Gandhi, Bodhi Dharma and Saint Francis, probably to sell them for their metal value. The three missing statues were replaced in 2010 by new copies cast in Japan.

Our guide next led us to the top of the hill, where we found another sculptural monument, symbolizing the unification of Buda and Pest into one city in 1873. A prince, personifying Buda, and a princess, personifying Pest, stretch their hands out to one another over the river Danube. The bronze sculpture is the creation of a Hungarian artist named Márta Lesenyei and was installed in 1982. 

Our first full day in Budapest concluded with a “Welcome to Hungary” feast at the Vadaspark Étterem (Étterem means “restaurant” in Hungarian – not exactly a cognate, think “eatery”!). The place is hidden in a woodland high in the hills of west Buda hills woodland next to the Budakeszi Wildlife Park. In appearance it is a traditional Hungarian hunting lodge, and it serves traditional Hungarian cuisine. Guests are seating on wooden benches at long wooden tables and the ambience is pleasantly rustic.

Dinner began with an aperitif, attractively served in a little ceramic cup in the form of a mustachioed Hungarian farmer in traditional costume. The little cup was filled with pálinka, a fruit brandy with a rather high alcohol content, between 37% and 86%, typically around 40%, but I think ours was more than 50%. Pálinka can made from plums, apricots, apples, pears, cherries and many other kinds of fruit, but not grapes. Brandy made from grapes is called törkölypálinka. When made entirely from apricots, it is called barackpálinka. One wonders how former President Obama feels about this. (Actually “barack” in Hungarian is pronounced “baratsk”.)

The food was delicious and attractively presented, and the wine flowed freely. But after pálinka and a few glasses of wine (both white and red), my memory ceased to operate effectively and I can’t say for sure which traditional Hungarian dishes we were served. I can say that it was all superb.

After-dinner entertainment consisted of folk dancing and music played by a live mini-orchestra with a superb violinist. But for the fact that the dancers were in traditional Hungarian dress, I would have thought it was a hoedown in the western USA, an impression that the pictures of cowboys and cattle on the walls reinforced.

After dinner, on the way back from the restaurant to the Hotel Corinthia, I shot my only photo of Budapest at night, with my Samsung phone camera – not a very good one, to be sure, but at least I managed to include both banks of the Danube in the frame, with the Parliament building (left, on the Pest side), Buda Castle (center) and Castle Hill with St. Matthew’s Church and Fishermen’s Bastion on the right. Try to ignore the reflections in the windows.

The Dohány Street Synagogue is affiliated with the Neolog or Congressional wing of Hungarian Jewry, a liberal and modernist denomination largely associated with middle and upper-class assimilated Jews, in sharp contrast to the conservative and traditionalist Orthodox Jewish community. The latter have their own places of worship, one of which is the Kazinczy Street Synagogue, which was our second stop in the Jewish Quarter. To get there we threaded our way through narrow, crowded streets, passing a number of interesting shops and tempting restaurants which I would have loved to patronize if there had been an opportunity.

The Kazinczy Street Orthodox Grand Synagogue was built in 1913, just before the First World War, in a style which is the last thing I would have expected from a conservative and traditionalist denomination: Art Nouveau. In fact it is considered a masterpiece of Art Nouveau architecture. The narrow street and the limitations of my equipment (not to mention the skills of the photographer) prevented me from doing visual justice to the synagogue, but one can see more adequate photos online, for example here. In the post-World War II period, under the kindly auspices of the Communist regime, the Orthodox Grand Synagogue deteriorated to the point of unusability, and a smaller house of worship, the Sasz-Chevra Orthodox Synagogue, was built next to it (after the collapse of Communism the main synagogue was restored and can be visited today). I initially mistook the unpretentious doorway providing entry to the smaller synagogue, which also leads to the Hanna glatt kosher restaurant, for the main entrance to the Grand Synagogue.

From Kazinczy Street we ambled on to the Carl Lutz Memorial, at the corner of Dob and Rumbach Streets. Carl Lutz was a Swiss diplomat who is credited with saving 62,000 Hungarian Jews from the Nazis during World War II.

Interestingly, Carl Lutz as a young man had emigrated to the United States. He lived there for two decades and worked his way through college, graduating from George Washington University in Washington, D.C., in 1924. By that time he had started working in the Swiss Legation there, and continued to pursue his diplomatic career in other American cities, remaining in the USA until 1934. In 1935 the Swiss diplomatic service sent him as a vice-consul to Jaffa in Palestine, where he apparently developed strong Jewish sympathies after watching a Jewish worker being lynched by an Arab mob. In 1942 he was appointed Swiss vice-consul in Budapest, and soon began helping Hungarian Jews emigrate to Palestine. He did so by issuing safe-conduct documents to Jewish families and by establishing safe houses, such as the famous “Glass House”, where Jews could live under official Swiss protection. His activities became so provocative that the German plenipotentiary in Hungary actually contemplated having him assassinated, but failed to obtain permission from his superiors. The Swiss government’s reward for his efforts was to reprimand him for exceeding his authority, though this was later reversed. He died in Switzerland in 1975.

The Carl Lutz Memorial on Dob Street is a most unusual construction. Its most striking component is a statue of Lutz in the form of a golden angel standing sideways on the side of a building. From his height, Lutz throws a very long cape to serve as a ramp for an wounded Holocaust victim lying on the ground. extending an arm up to plead for help. Also on the wall is a plaque featuring a quotation from the Talmud, “Whoever saves a life is considered to have saved an entire world.” Beneath the golden statue on the wall have been scrawled a plethora of graffiti, which some people feel has ruined the atmosphere, but it didn’t bother me. The graffiti were unintelligible to me, and I could not tell whether they consisted of the ravings of anti-Jewish hatemongers displaying their idiocy for all the world to see, or else they have nothing to do with the memorial at all, in which case they are merely artwork. In any case, the memorial is set in a shady garden which provides a semblance of peace. On the street corner, at the opposite end of the garden from the memorial itself, we noticed three mounds which consisted of the same kind of brickwork as that supporting the victim statue, but which had nothing near them to indicate what they represented. I don’t recall whether the guide said anything about them and I haven’t been able to find out anything more, so if anyone reading this can help I would be much obliged.

Turning the corner of Dob and Rumbach Streets, I found a graffiti-bedecked parking lot which turned out to be the base of an outfit calling itself Hot Rod Budapest, which offers tours of the city in fake “Deuces” – cut-down, souped-up 1932 American Ford open roadsters. Although these are obviously cheap imitations of the real thing, we would have tried them if we had a chance; we did something similar a few days later, in Prague, and enjoyed it greatly.

Continuing down Rumbach Street, we came across the Frogbite Tattoo Parlor. I don’t favor tattoos myself but I loved the name of the place. I had an old friend from FileNet days (mid-80s), Dennis Griesser, who was a ranarophile, otherwise known as a frog freak. I would have sent him a picture of the logo, but he passed away earlier this year. This page is dedicated to him in memoriam.

Also on Rumbach Street we encountered a number of other enticing establishments, such as the gaily decorated Bluebird Cafe, where I shot a picture of the entrance with an attractive young member of our tour group in front.

The Rumbach Street Synagogue is an octagonal structure built in 1872 in Moorish Revival style, like the Dohany Street Synagogue. In fact it was intended for the Neolog branch of Hungarian Jewry, but in the 1870s the schism between the Orthodox traditionalists and the Neolog modernizers evolved into a three-way split, with another conservative branch following its own path, to become known as the “Status Quo” faction; and the Rumbach Street Synagogue came under their aegis. Like the other two synagogues we viewed, the Rumbach deteriorated badly in the late 20th century, and was eventually restored to its pristine grandeur; today all three rank among the top architectural wonders of Budapest.

From Rumbach Street we headed back down Dob Street toward Károly Boulevard, a wide main thoroughfare which converges with Dohány Street near the Great Synagogue, where our bus awaited. On the way I was able to capture a few more subjects of interest with my camera, including a couple that probably won’t show up in any guidebooks.

For example, I noticed that in the crowded Jewish Quarter some attempts had been made to maximize the use of real estate by building archways spanning the space between buildings over an intervening street. An example is shown below.

Károly Boulevard and Dohány Street mark the border of the Jewish ghetto of World War II, and the “Gentile” side of the street is lined with upscale apartment buildings, pricey boutiques and posh hotels. Nevertheless, I found a specimen of the ubiquitous Budapest graffiti even here, and in a rather inaccessible yet highly visible place.

Budapest’s historic Jewish quarter might well be called the Playground District these days because it appears to be the center of the city’s night life. But that would obscure the fact that the quarter has seen a great deal of history, much of it tragic, which should not be forgotten.

So it was appropriate that we began our tour of the Jewish Quarter at the Dohány Street Synagogue. (Dohány means “tobacco” in Hungarian.) This is the largest synagogue in Europe, seating almost 3,000 people, and the only synagogues in the world that are larger are in Israel and New York. It was built in the 1850s in a Moorish Revival style with an admixture of Byzantine, Romantic and Gothic elements. I’m a big fan of Moorish architecture and I regard the Dohány Street Synagogue as a masterpiece.

The synagogue played a key role in World War II. Hungary, under the right-wing government of Admiral Horthy, a former Austro-Hungarian admiral, was an ally of Germany in World War II and sent troops to participate in Hitler’s invasion of Russia. In 1944, after the tide turned decisively against the Axis powers, the Nazis perceived that Hungary was wavering in its commitment to the alliance; they sent in the troops and installed a puppet government. Up to that time, the anti-Semitic Horthy regime had conducted sporadic deportations of Jews and allowed occasional atrocities against them, but now Adolf Eichmann took charge and the Holocaust in Hungary began in earnest. In 1944 over 400,000 Jews were deported to Auschwitz. Those who were not deported were mostly relocated to the Jewish ghetto in Budapest. About 119,000 remained in the ghetto by the time the Russians liberated the city in January 1945. The Dohány Street Synagogue served as a refuge for many Jews who were unable to find quarters elsewhere in the crowded ghetto. Nevertheless, the winter of 1944-45 was a cruel one, and many ghetto residents died of cold and hunger. About 2,000 of them are buried in a makeshift cemetery behind the synagogue. The cemetery courtyard is a place of verdant beauty and tranquility, with walls, arches, windows surrounding a garden, all reminiscent of Moorish palaces in Spain.

The cemetery courtyard is walled on one side by the Heroes’ Temple, an adjunct to the synagogue built in 1931 to commemorate the Jewish soldiers who lost their lives fighting with the Austro-Hungarian army during World War I. On the other side of the Heroes’ Temple is the Raoul Wallenberg Holocaust Memorial Park. As most people know these days, Raoul Wallenberg was a Swedish diplomat who managed by various subterfuges to save thousands of Jews from Nazis and Hungarian fascists during the terrible days of 1944. In January 1945 he was arrested on suspicion of espionage by the infamous Soviet counterintelligence organization SMERSH (abbreviation for the Russian words smert’ shpionam, “death to spies”), depicted somewhat cartoonishly in Ian Fleming’s James Bond novel From Russia with Love. Twelve years later, in 1957, the Soviets reported that he had died of a heart attack in 1947, while imprisoned in the notorious Lubyanka prison in Moscow. There is no need to dwell on the suspiciousness of the Soviet account.

The Raoul Wallenberg Holocaust Memorial Park contains two memorials: one to Wallenberg and other persons, mostly diplomats, who saved thousands of Jews from the gas chambers by various subterfuges; and the second to the over 400,000 Hungarian Jews who died in the Holocaust. The latter, known as the Emanuel Tree, is in the form of a weeping willow tree, made of metal, each leaf of which is inscribed with the name and tattoo number of a victim.

Our first full day in Budapest began with a visit to Hősök tere, Heroes’ Square, where some of the major milestones of Hungarian history are memorialized.

The centerpiece of Heroes’ Square is the Millenium Column, 36 meters (118 feet) high, with a statue of the Archangel Gabriel on top, holding a crown in one hand and a two-barred apostolic cross in the other. At the base of the column are mounted figures representing the Seven Magyar Chieftains, a group of semi-legendary figures who are supposed to have led the ancestors of the Hungarians into the land they have occupied ever since. Other than Árpád, considered to be the founder of the Hungarian nation, little is known about these men, and there are many uncertainties about Árpád’s life as well. In any case the equestrian statues are not intended to be realistic depictions.

What is well known is that in the late ninth century CE, a group of nomadic tribes known as the Magyars established themselves in the Carpathian basin, in the territory known to the Romans as Pannonia. They had previously lived in the Pontic steppes, north of the Black Sea, where they had been a thorn in the side of the Slavic people who later became the Russians, and had been in their turn harassed by Turkic nomadic peoples such as the Khazars, Bulgars and Pechenegs. The Magyars themselves were not Turkic but spoke – and still speak – a Uralic language, akin to Finnish. They originated in Central Asia and Siberia, where some Uralic languages are still spoken today. However, as nomadic horsemen they necessarily led an existence similar to the neighboring Turkic tribes and consequently developed a similar social structure, and eventually some of those tribes joined them in their migrations.

In any case, partly under pressure from their enemies, the Magyars moved west of the Carpathians and settled in the plains of the trans-Danubian basin, where they then became a thorn in the side of the neighboring German, Slavic and Vlach (Romanian) peoples. They had a reputation as particularly savage fighters, raiding the villages, slaughtering all the men and carrying off the women and children. However, this could not last, and in 955 the German king Otto I, later Holy Roman Emperor, inflicted a shattering defeat on the Magyars in the Battle of Lechfeld, ending their forays into Germany. In the following half-century the Magyars began to settle down, adopt a more sedentary lifestyle and convert to Christianity.

In front of the Millenium Column in Heroes’ Square is a large stone cenotaph – a symbolic tomb not containing any actual remains – that serves as a memorial to all those who died in defense of Hungarian liberty and independence.

Behind the column is a pair of semicircular colonnades, each containing statues of major figures of Hungarian history, and topped with symbolic theme sculptures: outer edge of the left colonnade, a statue of a man with a scythe and a woman sowing seed, representing Labor and Wealth; on the inner edge, a male figure, representing War, driving a chariot using a snake as a whip. Opposite War on the right colonnade is a woman in a chariot holding a palm frond, personifying Peace, and on the outer edge of the right colonnade, statues of a man and a woman, representing Knowledge and Glory.

From Heroes’ Square we walked across a bridge over a mostly dry lake to Budapest City Park. The bridge, furnished with an elegant bronze railing, was designed by and named for Szilárd Zielinski, a Hungarian engineer who was a pioneer of reinforced concrete construction. Looming ahead of us in the park was a structure which for all the world looked like a castle out of a Dracula movie. This was the Vajdahunyadi Castle, which as far as I can tell means “Copy of Hunyadi Castle.” It was originally built in 1896 as part of an exhibition celebrating the millenial of the Magyar occupation of the Carpathian basin, and it was designed to incorporate features of various landmark buildings of Hungary – but above all the Hunyadi Castle (also known as Corvin Castle) in Transylvania, which was then part of the Kingdom of Hungary. Originally built of wood, it was later rebuilt in brick and stone, which was fortunate, since Hungary lost Transylvania to Romania, and with it Hunyadi Castle, in the aftermath of World War I. The Hungarians of course have never been happy about this, and they would prefer to have Transylvania back. John Hunyadi was a great military leader in 15th-century Hungary and is credited with successfully defending Transylvania against the seemingly unstoppable Ottoman Turks, who had conquered most of the Balkans as well as Constantinople by 1453. The castle which he built is one of the most magnificent in Europe and is now a major Romanian tourist attraction.

The copy in Budapest, though perhaps not as grand as the original, is no cheap imitation. It looks like someplace where Count Dracula might have felt at home. It now houses the Hungarian Museum of Agriculture. We did not go into the museum; our guide led us through the park on a different and longer path from the one on which we had come in, which brought us back to Heroes’ Square and our waiting bus.

Our stroll back to the bus took us past a number of interesting landmarks. Most unexpected was a statue of George Washington, which was erected in 1904, while Hungary was still part of the Habsburg Empire, as a symbol of Hungarian-American friendship.

It was a bit difficult to believe, in the heat of the summer, that Budapest is a major world center for ice skating, with the largest ice skating rink in Europe. The dry basin over which we had crossed to get to Vajdahunyadi Castle is actually that rink; it is supposed to be filled with water during the summer to serve as a boating lake, but apparently the hot dry weather experienced by Central Europe this summer put the kibosh on that. Nevertheless the neo-Baroque pavilion built in 1893 to preside over the rink and provide a place for skaters to change into their skating shoes is still quite imposing.

On the edge of the park, down the street from Heroes’ Square, we encountered a very unusual structure which turned out to be the brand-new home of the Hungarian Museum of Ethnography. This museum was founded in 1872 and has had many different homes; from 1975 to 2022 it was housed in the Palace of Justice (Hungarian Supreme Court) building on Kossuth Square, which we would visit two days later. The museum reputedly contains extraordinarily diverse and colorful collections of artifacts from all over the world, though its primary emphasis is on the folk culture of Hungary and other nationalities of the former Austro-Hungarian empire. But since we did not have time to go inside, it was the exterior that captured all our attention. It appears to be a huge curved ramp that slopes up from the ground, with a roof garden and walkway on top. The sloping sides are decorated with various folk motifs. I’ve never seen anything quite like it.

It was a great relief finally to arrive at Ferenc Liszt Airport in Budapest. Ferenc, by the way, is the Hungarian form of the German name Franz, by which the composer is usually known, and as far as I can tell it is pronounced the same way. Since we were late, there was no one to meet us at the airport, but we called the Gate1 Tour Director, Krisztina, who arranged transport to our lodgings.

In Budapest we spent our first two nights, the 14th and 15th of June, in the Hotel Corinthia, one of the best hotels I’ve ever stayed in. Opened in 1896 as the Grand Hotel Royal, it has been through many ups and downs. In the early years, prior to World War I, it was the favorite haunt of the Hungarian literati and beau-monde. The great Hungarian composer Béla Bartók conducted concerts in the ballroom, and later a cinema was established there, which continued to operate until 1997. However, the hotel itself fell upon evil days after the Second World War. It was completely rebuilt in the 1950s and reopened in 1961. In 1991 it closed again, and was eventually revived with a 100-million-euro investment by the Corinthia Group, a Malta-based investment subsidiary of International Hotels, Inc. Although nothing of the original interior remains, the current furnishings still convey an atmosphere of fin-de-siecle luxury and opulence. And it couldn’t be faulted for comfort, either.

Our first impressions of Budapest were of a city of great beauty and great contrast. The contrast, of course, is between the old, represented mostly by the 18th and 19th-century inheritance, and the new, mostly dating from the post-1989 period, because most of the Communist-era appurtenances have been redone or removed. I’ve culled a few photos from some of our excursions over the succeeding days to provide abundant illustration of both the beauty and the diversity.

It’s important to keep in mind that Budapest began as two cities, one on either side of the Danube. (Actually there was a third, Obuda or Old Buda, just north of Buda, but let’s not complicate matters unnecessarily.) The Danube flows south at this point, and Buda is on the west bank, Pest on the east. Buda is hilly, Pest is flat. The two existed as separate cities for hundreds of years before being joined as one in 1867.

The next post will delve deeper into the sights we saw on our first full day in Budapest, Thursday the 15th of June 2023.