Budapest rises from the hillsides on either side of the Danube in a tangle of
spires, every bit as much the old warrior's helmet as the pinnacle of a
cathedral. It is breathtaking. From our vantage point in the sturdy old
Soviet hydrofoil, it indeed seemed to earn its self-proclaimed moniker, the
"Pearl of the Danube, usurping the crown from even Vienna, which wins
economically but loses when measured in charm. And it's hard not to like a
capital city you can enter via a watercourse, rather than through an airport
chafing under its own security measures.
Budapest is a story, its varied buildings and monuments testament to millennia
of shifting political winds, rising imperial forces, conquest and acquiescence,
destruction and resurrection, even reincarnation. We wandered among Turkish
baths, stuccoed buildings that dated from the Hapsburgs, and newer, Communist
structures built for modesty and conscious frugality. Knowing far too little
of Budapest's history, as I walked the streets, much of it was a mystery to
me. Perhaps that is part of the allure. The layers and textures of Hungary's
history are best appreciated aurally. Imola, our friend and guide, did her
best. About the royal palace on a bluff overlooking the Danube's west bank,
"there was an earlier palace on this site, but it was burned by the Mongols
when they invaded. The earliest Hungarians migrated east until they settled
here on the banks of the Danube, but in hindsight, most modern Hungarians wish
they'd gone a little further west and let someone else suffer the invasions
from the east." About the conversion of St. Mathieu to Roman Catholicism, not
Greek Orthodox Catholicism, "He knew it would bind us to the West at a time the
East was viewed with suspicion." And about the Soviet-inspired buildings whose
proletarian façades shrank behind the glorious baroque structures that flanked
them, "our Communists were more interested in showing they could save money
than making a statement of any eloquence."
As impenetrable as Hungary's convoluted history was its language, which
presented for me the first travel experience in which I could not be sure what
a store was selling without peering inside the store front. This imposed
illiteracy - my first experience - was humbling, to be sure, but it left
Budapest awash in an allure born of exoticism rather than intimacy, and like
the charming but aloof girl, inundated me with a passion to keep trying. The
Hungarian alphabet is a chopping board of diacriticals: dots and hashes, and
syllables that aggregate like wagons on a street car. I found it to be lovely,
a paradox of harsh looking letters that somehow slue off the tongue like the
ripples in the Danube.
We were there as much to enjoy a foreign city as to look up my ancestors, who
left their village to join the New World in the 19th century, passing without
doubt through Budapest before raising the gangplank on the steamer that would
bear them westward. But I enjoyed Budapest enough to wonder why they left. We
spent a couple of mornings in the city's parks, where my daughter made friends
of Hungarian children in the sandboxes; without fail within minutes they were
all sharing shovels and plastic pails. And we walked past the magnificent
parliamentary building, the nearly unpronouncable Országaház ("They've got over
200 solid gold cigar holders for the representatives!" whispered a Dutchman we
met at the hotel") in wonder of how something so magnificent could be erected
by humans, wandered by the myriad churches, and traversed the city to the tune
of the streetcar's bell (which Valentina loved).
I'd grown up thinking of Budapest as somewhat of a "Gateway to the East" but
realized neighboring Ukraine doesn't really fit my stereotype of the East.
It's a transition, nonetheless: a mix of the modern and the historical, the
east and the west, the rustic and the urban. Pearl of the Danube, indeed: I
will return here some day.
