This was a loooong day.
After breakfast we walked down to Parliament to book some tickets for a guided tour later in the day. I liked the fact that the east frontage was reflected in a kind of rill in front of the building. There’s also some great statuary – this is a section of a large memorial to the Prime Minister István Tisza, who was assassinated in 1918.
We then walked down Váci Utca, a long commercial street which one of our guide books described as “quite simply the heart and soul of Budapest”; I can’t say that I had that impression, but I was fairly irritated to have to keep shrugging off people who were trying to persuade me either to enter restaurants or (unflatteringly) to accept free samples of soap.
We made it to the end of the street more or less in one piece, and crossed the Liberty Bridge, getting a rather daunting view of our destination: the Liberation Monument at the top of Gellért Hill. There is a church built into the rock face, which is very famous, but we didn’t visit it. Instead we fortified ourselves with coffee and cake at the famous Gellért Hotel – a slightly strange experience because the place seems still to exist in the 1960s, though it does have some cracking stained glass on every landing of the main staircase. We also wandered into the baths complex at the hotel, but decided that climbing the Hill would probably be enough exercise for one day.
If you suffer even slightly from vertigo you’ll be familiar with a strange sensation in the muscles of your buttocks and legs, which I attribute to your central nervous system trying to force you to sit down on the nearest available hard surface – in which case you’ll understand when I say that I was fighting my nervous system most of the way up that hill. There were points when it very nearly won, and the only way I could go forward was to keep my eyes firmly fixed on CH’s heels, and not lift my head at all. But it was worth it – the view from the top is spectacular, even if you’re not looking forward to the journey back down!
So, the main photo today is the central figure of the Liberation Monument, which was originally constructed as a tribute to the Red Army but repurposed after the fall of the Soviet Union. She represents peace, and the figures either side of her represent the battle with evil and progress. My second image shows the entire group, and there’s another view of progress here.
Coming back down the hill there are great views of the Royal Palace, the Elizabeth Bridge, which we crossed to get back into Pest, and the Parliament. There’s another memorial too: St Gellért was apparently thrown off the hill for some reason to do with religion; you might think it tasteless to name the place after him in the circumstances, but I couldn’t possibly comment.
After more coffee and cake, and a brief sit-down, we did the tour of Parliament, which is extraordinary. There’s a great exhibition in the basement of photographs and models connected with the recent refurbishment of the building.
By now we were as exhausted as you must be, so we tiptoed through the spring tulips to a restaurant by the Danube, from where we could watch the sun going down over the Royal Palace.
Other things that caught my eye today were the competing tiled roofs of the Mátyás and Calvinist Churches, and a statue of Atilla József looking rather depressed.
