Budapest was the first trip we had taken out of Italy since December and the first with any of our Italian friends. Roberta and Maurizio proved to be great traveling partners and we had fun with the fact that in Hungary more English is spoken than Italian so, for a change, we needed to translate menus, etc. for them.
Let me just say this about the weather, it was not always warm.
As many of you already know, this place was once two (three if you count Òbuda) different cities, Buda and Pest occupying opposite banks of the second longest river in Europe, the Danube. Buda being on the hilly right (west) bank and Pest occupying the rather flat left (east) bank. They became one municipality in the 19th century. You get all of the grand views of the area from the hills above Buda and all of the nightlife, most of the shopping, restaurants, the rail station and the airport are on the Pest side.
We found this place to be enchanting and despite the fact that they have great public transportation, we walked several miles a day to take in the sights and smells of this cosmopolitan city.
Like many of the places we have visited, Budapest has a long and varied history of one empire or another taking control. The Celts, the Romans, and the Ottoman’s all had their day. It was, for a time, the co-capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. One of the tragedies of the 20th century was the revolt against the Soviet Union in 1956 that was so brutally put down. Wherever we went, we seemed to run into tales of World War II and the holocaust.
We visited the beautiful synagogue (one of the largest in Europe) and although it costs to get in, it was worth every penny. There is also a memorial to the nearly 600,000 Hungarian Jews who were either killed in Budapest or sent to concentration camps never to return. The place is as beautiful as it is haunting.
Along both sides of the Danube there are promenades and trams to take you up and down the river. We were walking along the Pest side and we saw in front of us a number of shoes just sitting along the walkway. As we got closer, we realized that they were all cast in iron and had many vigil candles scattered in their midst. Many of you may know the Shoes on the Danube Bank memorial, but none of us had been aware of it before we stumbled on it.
During the fascist control in Budapest during World War II, the Arrow Cross militiamen (local fascists) would line people they considered enemies of the state up beside the Danube, make them take off their shoes (as shoes were valuable at the time) and then shoot them in the back so they would fall into the Danube and be washed away saving the cost of burial. 3,500 people (800 of them Jews) were executed in this manner. I am not always moved by war memorials, but this one haunts me like few others (maybe the Vietnam Memorial in DC, but that is personal). Let it serve as a reminder to us all that fear of the “other” and intolerance can lead normal people to do extraordinarily cruel and inhuman things to their fellow citizens.
