Home » Hungary » Budapest, Hungary

Before the war, Budapest had a large and prosperous Jewish community. The Great Synagogue is a reminder of that time, a grand and glorious structure whose look owes more to Byzantium than Jerusalem.

Budapest, Hungary

Hank Shiffman
2003-11-29 14:24:24

Displayed times (last time: )

Travel for a while and you learn an important lesson: treat guidebooks with an attitude somewhere between skepticism and outright contempt. Their job is to make a destination sound interesting and attractive, while avoiding the slippery slope that leads to outright fiction. (And sometimes their maps leave reality far behind.) So when my guidebook to Budapest spoke of the city in the most glowing of terms I was hopeful but prepared for some amount of disappointment.

For once I was worried over nothing. Budapest is a remarkable place, full of history and whimsy, of beauty bestowed by nature and by man. (God, that's good!) Situated on the Danube River (known to the locals as the Duna), it's actually two separate cities: Buda, the hilly city to the west and Pest, the flatter city to the east. Only recently (a hundred years, which is no time at all for a place this old) have they been joined by a series of bridges. The one on the right is the Chain Bridge, the oldest of the lot. Both of these pictures were taken from Buda, looking at the Pest riverfront.

A couple of views of Buda from the Pest side of the river. Buda is a lot hillier, and the locals used the heights for many monuments to their history. The one on the right honors an early missionary who tried to bring Christian enlightenment (and, one assumes, the Missionary Position). For his troubles he was thrown off a cliff either in a wheelbarrow or nailed into a barrel (the record is unclear). Later on Christianity took, and I guess the locals decided he wasn't such a bad guy and built him the monument. It's neat and all, with its own waterfall. But I wonder if he would rather have skipped the whole deal...

A study in contrasts. On the left you can see a picturesque street from Castle Hill on the Buda side of the river. This was right around the corner from the Hilton, itself a modern structure that uses the ...