House of Terror

One must-see site in Budapest is the House of Terror, once the location of the Nazi secret police and then the Communist secret police.

It is located at Andrássy út 60, the street that is home to such elegance and sophistication nearby. It's impossible to miss, with those huge black borders, just north of the Oktagon and a stop for the #4/6 trams and the gold-line subway.

All along the building outside are small photos of the heroes of the 1956 Hungarian uprising against the Communists, with a plaque "They died for you" in Hungarian and English and several bouquets and wreaths.

The extremely heavy doors are difficult to pull open and the ominous mood of this building with the chilling history strikes you immediately. Admission is 1000 HUF (about $5.00), but it's free if you have an "International Teacher Identity Card" (ITIC), which I had obtained at the recommendation of the Fulbright Commission.

Pictures were not allowed inside. The first thing you see is an old Soviet tank in the middle of the first floor, floating in a smelly oily substance, surrounded by several floors of offices looking down on this center area. Staff send you to the top floor by elevator, where high-tech displays show the encroachment of the Nazis on a map of Europe and historic film footage showing first the occupation of the Nazis and then the Communists. As you work your way down through the levels of the building, you are led through displays of artifacts from the Jews sent to their deaths by the Nazis, the uniforms of the Hungarian Nazis and then the Communists, and more historic footage.

You walk through rooms for interrogation and torture, with tools of the trade on display. Another room shows the listening devices used to spy on citizens. Offices of the staff and the head of the secret service for both regimes are on view with their original furniture. Each room has a hand-out explaining the exhibit in both Hungarian and English.

For the final stage of the tour, you enter a glass elevator for the descent into the basement cells. But the elevator goes at a snail's pace and a film of a survivor on a flat-screen TV describes the process of execution and torture used in the building (with English subtitles). The cells in the smelly, dark basement are crude, small, and terrifying. The room where people were hung by kicking out a stool under the noose is on view there too.

As you head for the exit, you are greeted by film in color from June 1991 showing the Soviet troops happily packing up their equipment on trains for their peaceful departure from Hungary. But that's not the final stop for the exhibit. One more room has a rogue's gallery of what they call the "victimizers," with the photos, names, and dates of birth and (sometimes) death of the people who carried out their crimes against humanity in this building -- some of whom seem to still be living.

This was the most emotionally draining exhibit I have seen in a long time. I understood that it is surrounded by political controversy, with right-wing politicians accused of short-changing the displays on the Nazis. A new Holocaust Museum opened a few years ago in Budapest, reportedly in response to this criticism.

I could not help but wonder what future generations will think of waterboarding, wiretapping U.S. citizens without warrants, and the belittling of the Geneva Conventions -- and whose pictures might be hanging on a future rogue's gallery of Victimizers.

The cafeteria favored by the secret police who worked here is just down the street at Andrássy út 70, now a chic espresso bar called Lukács Cukrászda. A cafe has operated there since 1912 and the Baroque decor is beautiful. But I was relieved when they said they do not accept credit cards, as it gave me a good excuse to leave the land of torturers and find a more welcoming environment.

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Rainy day

It's rainy and in the high 30s in Budapest today, but I bundled up to take a look at some sites of special interest.

This is the Museum of Applied Arts designed by the Hungarian Art Nouveau architect Ödön Lechner. He designed Bratislava's Blue Church and a few other buildings there over a century ago. This is on Üllői út, just north of a stop on the #4/6 tram line.

Lechner designed this Post Office Savings Bank in 1901. It's located at Freedom Square, east of the U.S. Embassy. Between renovation on the ground level, traffic, trees, and rain, it was difficult to get a good shot, but you can get a sense of the intricate design here.

Another striking landmark is this Jewish Synagogue, the largest in Europe, designed in the mid-19th century by Ludwig Förster. Reportedly, it seats 6000 people. It's located just north of the National Museum, on Károly körút.

I also visited the Christmas Markets to see how they compared with those in Bratislava and Vienna. This is the biggest and nicest, located at Vörösmarty ter., at the north end of the pedestrian shopping area. The crafts and food were Hungarian, but the idea was essentially the same. Even on a chilly, rainy day, plenty of people were visiting. That huge modern building on the left houses the New Yorker clothing chain on the ground level and offices upstairs.

Those temporary Christmas booths are shoehorned into every available open space around the city, especially subway stops. This one is on a little side street just south of the Oktagon.

I found a post office opposite the National Museum to mail some postcards. As in Prague and Bratislava, they only take local currency, but they do provide currency exchange that is reliable and fair. (The Austrian post office takes credit cards.)

I didn't stop for coffee at the California Coffee Company on the west side of the Museum, and couldn't tell from the menu in front what was Californian about it.

I also didn't stop at any of the underground WC's, which are everywhere in this city for the truly desperate. I do see a lot of homeless street people here carrying around shopping bags, and I wonder if they use these as "apartments," as they do in Santa Monica. I'll let somebody else find out the answer to that question.

As for that National Museum, it was a huge disappointment. It was designed by Pollack, who designed the glorious Pest Concert Hall I saw yesterday. This seemed just a very pedestrian, unimaginative neoclassical monument.

Before I found the Museum, I saw this beautiful building on a side street to its southwest and thought this must have been designed by him. Unfortunately, I could not find any information about this at all.

In between all of this trooping around, I took another spin on the #6 tram -- a great way to rest your feet and absorb more of the city out of the rain. No ticket inspectors on the trams today, but teams of inspectors were waiting at almost every subway exit.

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Budapest

With my lecturing finished at the University, I am visiting nearby Budapest for a few days. It's south of Bratislava on the Danube, an easy two-hour train ride. I even got two new stamps in my passport, one from the Slovak border agent and another from the Hungarian, a first.

This is the National Gallery in the Palace complex on the Buda (west) side of the Danube, taken on this very foggy day. With major historic buildings on both sides of the river, it evokes Prague, although that's a different river.

This is the Pest Concert Hall, one of the most beautiful buildings I saw today. Designed by Mihály Pollack, it traces to the mid-19th century. The mix of historic architectural styles in Budapest is strikingly similar to Bratislava, no surprise since some of the same architects worked in both cities and, indeed, since Bratislava (then called Pressburg) was the capital of Hungary for a couple of centuries.

I spotted just one building with an exterior painting, of the kind so common in Prague. This one (in the middle) faces a major construction site by Szabadság híd (Freedom Bridge), where the new fourth subway line is under construction.

On the other side of the street is Corvinus University of Budapest, in an architectural style I never see in Bratislava.

Budapest has a bustling pedestrian-only shopping area in the middle of town, just like Vienna, Prague, and Bratislava. This is Váci utca, running north and south, a couple of blocks east of the river.

On Régi Posta utca, a little side street off that shopping street, McDonald's has gone up-scale with McCafe, serving high-end pastries and great coffees in china cups. This was Budapest's first McDonald's, opening in 1988.

I've gotten used to seeing American pop culture absorbed everywhere here, but I did a double-take at the "MTV" sign on this historic building on "Freedom Square" -- until I realized that was short for Magyar Televízió (Hungarian TV).

These huge photographs of Los Angeles and Times Square in a Burger King by the Oktagon are not uncommon in central Europe.

Travel tip of the day: My round-trip first-class ticket on the very nice EuroCity train was 902 SKK (about $37). I bought it at the Bratislava train station an hour before I left. The clerks speak English and they take credit cards. The RailEurope web site, for the identical trains on the same days, charged $64 for round-trip second-class and $94 for round-trip first class. I am not making this up. I'm seeing a lot of on-line articles with tips for how Americans can cut costs on European holidays, given the collapse of the dollar. Here's another: wait until you get here to buy your train tickets.

This blog entry has gotten very long, so I'll do separate ones for some other things that caught my attention today.

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