Europe 24 - Budapest, Day 2

We slept well, that first night. The beds were comfortable. The AC was humming. The showers had cleaned off a day and a half of travel grime. And we had nothing scheduled the next day until the evening so there was no reason to keep track of the time and every reason to rest up and reset our internal clocks to Hungarian time.

We had lots of things we wanted to do that day, don’t get me wrong. We are not “chill out and hang out” sort of vacationers. Just nothing at any given time until after dinner.

So it was a quiet and restful morning before we headed back out into Budapest to see what there was to see.

When you leave the apartment building and turn left St. Stephen’s Basilica is right there in front of you, two or three blocks away, which made it a natural goal for the morning. It’s a pleasant walk and then you get there and a) it is really impressive, and b) you have no idea how to get in. Because it’s not as simple as just walking in, the way you can do in pretty much every church in Italy that isn’t home to a pope and even some that are. They charge admission. And you’d think that the place that sold the tickets would be right there at the front door of the Basilica, but you’d be wrong and the person at the little booth would have to explain that no, this just sells souvenirs and you need to go to the office where they actually do sell the tickets. It’s over to the right, in a little storefront next to a café, and then you have to figure out how to get there – you can see it, it’s maybe forty paces in a straight line – but the path between you and the front door is festooned with obstacles: stairs, low walls, bushes, railings, and so on. But you persevere, because it really is an impressive church and you want to get inside.

And then you’re in, and it turns out you were absolutely right about that.

St. Stephen’s is a gorgeous place and we wandered around for a good chunk of the morning, just taking it all in. It’s got statues and stained glass and more decoration than you can possibly imagine and every time you turn your head you are presented with impossible beauty.

Also, after having been to Rome and the Vatican and seen the statues and paintings of the various saints on display there – all of whom with vanishingly few exceptions either have the clean-cut gravitas of ex-Marines or the willowy wistfulness of Art Nouveau hippies – it has to be said that St. Stephen looks like he should be playing bass for a heavy metal band. I know nothing about his actual biography, but I have to admit this did give me a certain fondness for the man.

You’re allowed to climb up to the top of the dome if you buy the all-inclusive ticket (and they do check), and while Kim decided that this would be a good time to explore the nearby neighborhood in search of coffee Oliver and I thought we would see what there was to see up there. It’s over 300 steps up a tightly winding staircase, according to the guide – we didn’t count, though I have no reason to doubt it – but about halfway up you do get a break so you can visit the Treasury and this was a welcome respite indeed.

The Treasury consists of two rooms full of vestments, paintings, sculptures, gold objects that would be useful in a Basilica, and a plaster model of the place, and you can explore it to your heart’s content. The crowd does thin out as you climb up so there’s more space for you to see things up here.

I think my favorite things in the Treasury were these two statues, though. They seem somewhat perplexed as to what precisely you are doing there, but willing to let you by if you don’t do anything rash. Believe me, after 150+ steps, rash was not on our dance card.

We climbed the rest of the way up only to find ourselves at an elevator, which we shared with a couple of Australians. It takes you to the bottom of the dome, where you can see the inner structure. The pointy bit at the bottom in the dome photo is the top of the dome you see from the floor of the church.

From there they have a path that leads you outside to a stone walkway that goes all the way around the bottom of the dome and you get some spectacular views of Budapest from there. Oliver and I spent a happy half hour slowly making our way around clockwise (which seemed against the flow of most traffic, but so be it) and marveling at the city below us. Also, the hot air balloon, which in the end we decided must be some kind of tethered fixture because it never moved.

Eventually we found our way back down to the street and over to the little café where Kim had in fact found coffee, and we sat there for a while planning our next move. We decided that our destination would be a different sort of religious building, the Dohàny Street Synagogue. We found our coordinates and headed off.

Budapest is a pleasant city to walk around.

 

There is even a little book cart which we managed to stumble across twice though we never did buy anything. All of the books were in Hungarian, for one thing and they’re heavy for another, but how can you not love a city that has a book cart?

There was a small detour to a little corner kebab place for lunch. It was one of those places where you just point at the things behind the counter and they give them to you, though it turned out that they were supposed to give Oliver two skewers of chicken and only gave him one, which one of the employees at a nearby table was very offended by and quickly corrected. It was good food, but heavy and rather a lot of it – a running theme in Hungary.

The Dohàny Street Synagogue is a marvel of a place. Hungary at one point had an extraordinarily large Jewish population and the Dohàny Street Synagogue is the largest in Europe, capable of holding almost 3000 people. It was built in the mid-1800s when there was a demand for it, but then the 20th-century happened with a sickening thud and after the anti-Semitic laws of the 1920s and 30s and the Holocaust of the 1940s the Jewish community of Budapest was nearly eliminated. The building itself was poorly treated by the Hungarian right-wing government before the war, the Nazis during the war, and the Communists after the war, but in the 1990s it was restored to something approaching its former glory. We paid our admission and wandered in, joining an English-language tour already in progress.

There’s a lot to see there, and a lot of stories to tell. The tour starts in the main synagogue before going outside to what is more of a memorial than a cemetery and then out to the rear of the building where there is a park dedicated to Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who saved thousands of Jews from the Holocaust before disappearing into a Soviet prison where he likely died in 1947. The park also memorializes other similarly heroic figures, as well as the 400,000 Hungarian Jews who were murdered by the Nazis and the right-wing Hungarian Arrow Cross government – the one that Viktor Orbàn’s sculpture (described in the previous post) is trying to whitewash. There are memorials throughout the little park, including a sculpture of a tree where every leaf is engraved with a name. It’s a sobering experience.

The Dohàny Street Synagogue is quite a complex, really, and it also includes a newer synagogue that you’re welcome to explore and a well-designed Holocaust museum in the brick-lined basement level underneath the main synagogue.

There’s also a museum of Jewish life with artifacts that go back to the origins of the Jewish community in Budapest in the early medieval period. These museums always have a heavy weight of history to them, but this was bright and well laid out and you could tell they tried to have some fun with it as well. You don’t always get kitsch in a museum, let alone a clear explanation of why it would be there, and as someone who used to run a museum I appreciated that.

Not quite synagogued out, we decided to walk a few blocks over to the Rumbach Street Synagogue, an octagonal structure built in the 1800s in a Moorish Revival style that now also serves as a museum and concert space. But before we got there we found more art.

Some of it was just fun to see.

But some of it was kind of confusing. This sculpture, for example, was a bit down a side path for us and we were fascinated by it. We had to dodge the guy doing maintenance work on it, but it was worth it. A quick internet search just now tells me this is dedicated to Carl Lutz, a Swiss diplomat credited with saving over 60,000 lives during the Holocaust.

Also, some of the art was sobering. We first discovered Stumbling Stones in Rome and they’re all over Europe now. They mark the places were Jews lived before the Holocaust, and they tell you their names and what happened to them. Names matter. Memory matters. In an age where we seem to be hurtling ever more rapidly back toward right-wing extremism, it is important to remember where that leads.

The Rumbach Street Synagogue is another lovely place, much smaller than the Dohàny Street Synagogue but with its own charm.

And if you go all the way up to the top floor there is a fascinating interactive exhibit on the history of the Politzer family, from its origins in medieval Budapest to the modern day when their American descendants are known as the Pulitzers. It has movies, holograms, artifacts, audio, and some great lighting, though it really doesn’t lend itself to photographs. I missed it on my first pass through but Kim told me about it so I went back in (they do charge admission to Rumbach Street, as with all attractions in Budapest, but they recognized me and let me back in). It was worth it.

We were by no means done with the day, though, so we hopped on the 23 Tram and headed over to the Central Market Hall.

If you’ve ever been to the Reading Terminal Market in Philadelphia or the Testaccio Market in Rome you’d recognize this place immediately. It’s a giant shed of a building, full of individual market stalls selling food, souvenirs, and all sorts of other things, and underneath there’s an Aldi’s. It’s gotten fairly touristy in recent years – certainly far more so than Reading Terminal or Testaccio, which are both places more for locals – so you will not find any bargains here but it’s still a fascinating place to wander around. There’s more public art as well, and we ended up getting a few snacks and some tasty cured sausages to take home.

We also found this in the Aldi’s. It’s interesting how whenever a European company wants to advertise something as “extra-large” they slap the adjective “American” on it.

From there we went back to our apartment for a siesta, which has become an integral part of our vacationing strategy. It’s good to have a break in the middle of the day to rest. We ended up watching some Hungarian television, including a children’s show featuring a woman baking what looked like a cinnamon roll as big as her head and a documentary on salt mining that was interesting to look at even if we had no idea what they were saying.

For dinner that night we decided to try classic Hungarian food, so we found a place right by our apartment and sat down at one of the tables outside (which had a deep red light on it, which is why the photos came out the way they did). There was a group of musicians inside the place and we enjoyed their playing. I ended up getting something called a làngos, which is kind of like a Hungarian pizza. It’s fried dough covered with sour cream, garlic, cheese, and whatever toppings they have on the menu and it’s heavy but tasty. I also got my Aperol Spritz, so I was a happy little tourist out there in the open air, watching people walk by as we ate dinner.

Our one scheduled event this day was set for 7pm by the river, so after dinner we headed toward the Danube. We had plenty of time, so rather than go straight there we decided to walk across the Chain Bridge. The lions are apparently famous – there are a lot of lion statues in Budapest and after a while they all start to blend together, but these do stand out – and the walk was crowded with people out enjoying a nice summer evening.

You can get some lovely views of the Danube and the city from the bridge.

 

 

Our scheduled event was an hour-long river cruise up the Danube. There’s a lot of them, and they’re a great way to see the city – especially at night. They also come with a drink included in the ticket, which was nice. It was a pleasant walk over to Dock 7 and we got in line with our boatmates. The boat had seating at the water level and on top and we ended up on top with the Instagrammers, which had its pluses and minuses. On the one hand, the views of the city were spectacular. On the other hand, hardcore Instagrammers are some of the most narcissistic people on the planet and they tend to block those views for everyone else. There was one young woman and her manservant who spent the entire cruise doing this, and there is a petty part of me that I’m not especially proud of that hopes none of her pictures came out. But we did manage to see around her much of the time, and it was well worth the ticket price.

Budapest is a really gorgeous city.

We walked back to the apartment after that, spending some time along the way with a guy playing bells on the street. He was really good at it, and it was a nice way to end the day.