Exilian

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It's almost a running joke that I don't go to a lot of capital cities. As of the time of writing, I have been to Germany but not Berlin, France many times but never Paris, Spain but not Madrid, Italy but not Rome, the Netherlands but not Amsterdam, Slovenia but not Ljubljana, Bulgaria but not Sofia – there are several more on the list, but in any case one can't deny the pattern. It's not been an especially intentional one, though I sometimes find national capitals both daunting and, as a firmly mud-booted provincial myself, I always harbour the suspicion that a more representative idea of a country might be found in its smaller cities. As such, deciding to travel to Budapest as my introduction to Hungary might have been a bit of a change of tone. Museums would be many, I knew, and public buildings grandiose: and comparisons to Vienna, the Habsburg capital I actually inhabit, would be unavoidable. I mulled over what to prioritise seeing as I boarded an early train and headed east.

Like so many places, my naïve imaginary of Hungary was quite different to the reality, even from the train. Grey skies hung overhead, and wooded hills and river-valleys clung around the rail line from Vienna. My mental associations of Hungary consisted largely of simply the Hungarian plain with horses and pastures: I would sit sometimes on walks amid the little patches of dry hill grassland south of Vienna, and look east to the distant hills, and wonder if there were much larger. It is both true that there are such places in Hungary, but also that one can visit the country whilst interacting with them rather little: and it is true, always, that the reality of a place is much more complex than a daydream.
There are little changes in any new place, of course. Slight differences in the architecture give the little hints of change as one passes eastwards – Hungarian houses often have rooves that change angle as they slope, with a slightly flatter bottom section, something one doesn't see in Austria. The railway mostly runs parallel to the river, excepting missing a loop where the Danube turns sharply southwards just north of Budapest. From there it cuts through the centre of the city, of Hungary beyond, and eventually heads for Serbia. Buda is the old fortified town on the western bank, and Pest is its lower lying counterpart on the eastern side. The combined name is modern, the result of an official combination of the districts as recently as 1873: it is Buda that really has its place as the historical capital, though Pest has been a settled town for most of that history and important in its proximity to the seat of power.

The railway curls through the city to arrive at Keleti station, east of the two old city centres of Buda and Pest. The station has a certain old-fashioned Habsburg feel, with signed wooden slots in the walls for particular kinds of shop important to travellers, mostly food outlets selling possibly the worst array of sandwiches I have seen at a European train station. It has charm if not culinary quality, and one can easily hop on an underground line to head towards the centre.

Once I emerged into central Pest, the city itself immediately hit me as feeling bigger than Vienna. It isn't, in terms of population: the two cities are quite similar in size. However, the old town of Pest has taller buildings and wider streets in which it is easier to feel dwarfed by one's surroundings. Buda, across the Danube, is sat on a high ridge which gives some hugely dominating views of its public buildings: in contrast Vienna's often fade into the background, easily lost from sight and mind just a few streets from where they sit. It is a noisier city, too: the public transport is not bad but there is undeniably more, faster, and noisier traffic far closer to the centre than in the city's Austrian counterpart.

I reached the apartment where I was staying, unpacked, and then my evening was spent heading out through the city, first to the river, then crossing a bridge and ascending Gellért Hill.  The hill is named for St. Gellért, or Gerard, who was apocryphally martyred there in the 11th century, a reminder of how much later missionary activity was going on here than in much of western or southern Europe. It lies south of the old centre of Buda, and is capped by the 'Citadella' – a large 19th century fortress. The lower sections of the walk were reasonably pleasant, with some presumably nineteenth century stone steps up toward the saint's statue and a waterfall feature under his feet: higher up the woods are relatively dry, with a lot of paths and little undergrowth. It was swelteringly humid, and deathly quiet except for other walkers, with a surprising lack of birds. There are a few open areas of grass, though these have been far more heavily cut than makes any sense, to the point where they are beginning to become dust-bowls. The lack of butterflies was as noticeable as the lack of birds, with a single red admiral almost the only one in sight.

Once one reaches the top, the Citadella itself awaits, or would have done were it not closed as part of an extensive renovation project. To say that the building has had a chequered past would be to grossly underplay the darkness of its history: from its construction in the 19th century it has largely been a focal point for foreign powers trying to dominate the city – it was built using forced labour by Habsburg general Julius von Haynau, whose reputation for brutal suppression of rebels can be summed up by his being known as both the 'Hangman of Arad' in Hungary and the 'Hyena of Brescia' in Italy. The resulting building was unsurprisingly a point of tension between the Hungarians and Austrians, with the outer walls demolished by the Hungarians in 1900. Despite this and more darkly still, the fortress was occupied by Soviet troops again in the 1950s during the lightning-strike war that crushed premier Imre Nagy's separatist rising against the Warsaw Pact. The building site I saw is part of an attempt to build a revitalised park and museum area backed by several million euros' worth of government funding, after some decades of disrepair. The changes are set to be larger than might be usual for historic buildings, including demolition of a 20th century bunker and knocking some holes in the 19th century walls to improve public access: how well this will all be achieved remains to be seen. In any case, some viewing points are still open, and there are some excellent views down towards the city which I enjoyed before heading down again.

Food that evening was at Kupak, a bar/bistro just around the corner from where I was staying, where I got a 'supreme langos'. Langos, for the uninitiated, are a Hungarian dish essentially comprising a large puffy slab of fried dough, often brushed with quantities of garlic that make one realise why the vampires by and large stayed safely a little further east of Hungary. This one, rather than the garlic brushing, was treated almost more as a pizza base, with a mix of Hungarian salami, chicken, tomato, onion, pepper, and some kind of sheep cheese added on top. To say that it was hearty would be putting the combination of carbohydrate and protein very gently, but it was good food and a use of langos that I'd not come across in my encounters with it outside Hungary itself.

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I got up the next morning and got a very small bite to eat at an underground station kiosk I was passing by while I headed out. One way I knew, more than once, on the trip that I have become somewhat more Austrian in my sensibilities over time was the way that some part of me was complaining about the lack of Austrian bakeries: Hungary has plenty of cafes and indeed some small bakeries of its own, but they seemed harder to find than Viennese equivalents, at least in the more central parts of the city, and by and large the bread quality was markedly worse than further west.

The national museum was the main event for the day: it boasts a range of galleries on Hungarian history and prehistory, including a large roman and medieval lapidarium, standard history galleries through time, and a special gallery with a collection of silverware from the Seuso Treasure and some of the Hungarian coronation artefacts. The material is generally well presented, and the divisions echo classical stories of Hungarian history: a broadly tripartite division between a modern period from the Habsburgs to the present, a historical Hungary from the first Magyar kings through to the Ottomans, and an ancient world encompassing the pre-Magyar region.

Like with most countries, there is an element of apologia about the way Hungary's historical narratives are presented. The core of the story, like in many eastern European states, is one of a continual struggle for national independence in the face of various forms of outside aggression. Exactly who the struggle was against is a little more complex. For the late medieval and early modern periods, opposition to Ottoman rule is presented as being aligned with this goal, although once the Ottomans had been pushed out the Imperial forces of Habsburg Austria moved quickly to suppress Hungarian independence sentiments, providing their own forcible model of Imperial lordship. The wish to avoid fully conflating the Catholic, European Austrians with the Ottomans as external oppressors is quite noticeable, though exactly how different each country's suppression of Hungarian dissent ended up being – certainly Habsburg-era Hungary was not short of rebellions and anti-Austrian movements - is a little less clear.

Budapest cannot help but fit uneasily into this winding tale. As a capital city, it in some ways feels like one of the most heavily tied to its respective state in Europe. It is heavily and intentionally built as a capital, with far less visible urban identity of its own than – to return to its counterpart to the west - Vienna. There, the Rathaus is the dominant civic building in the centre, city government dwarfing the national parliament next door and even standing impressive compared to the sprawl of the Hofburg palace. In Budapest, the cathedral-like dome of the national parliament is the city's most visible centrepiece building, and the grand palatial constructions of the Habsburg palaces loom from atop the hill in Buda. Since before - and indeed also during – the Ottoman period, Budapest has been the administrative centre of Hungary, with the question faced by the city really being what sort of Hungary there might or might not end up being for it to administer.

The special gallery in the National museum is especially worth seeing: the surviving medieval coronation regalia cannot be photographed, but are very well worth seeing nonetheless. The Seuso treasure might however outshine them: a collection of huge silver bowls, plates, and perfume pots from the Roman period, they provide an exceptional riot of detail and an imaginary that one associates far more – unsurprisingly – with the classical Mediterranean. Hungary's national myths might primarily start with the early medieval period and the Magyars, but this land saw no shortage of peoples and visitors before their arrival.

I decided to get out of the maze of galleries, and headed through Pest towards the river. It was only once I was across the river, heading towards Buda and the Fisherman's Bastion, that I got round to looking up what the very visible parliament building actually was – I had probably assumed it was the Cathedral until I did so, with its enormous dome and soaring towers. Whereas from Pest's side of the river the old palace and the Fisherman's Bastion dominate the far side of the Danube, if one ascends the hill to Buda then the parliament is the dominant construction on the eastern bank, north of the old centre of Pest and enjoying one of the most visible locations in the city where the river bends. Its presentation in the manner of a more sacral sort of dome cannot be accidental: its 96 metre height supposedly commemorates the Hungarian conquest of Carpathia (896) – a strange thing, really, to build a cathedral in immovable stone to those whose lives and stories were so defined by their mobility. But that is in part the nature of a national project: taking a much more fluid, mobile reality of groups and people and hopes and lives and saying, we. These people, they are all us.

I climbed Buda hill: it was hot, and the winding paths up the hillside are not altogether well signed, though the hill itself is not so large that ending up emerging at the wrong place atop it would require too dramatic a detour. There is a little funicular for those who want a less steep route uphill, though I didn't use it due to the somewhat offputtingly long queues. One thing that was noticeable in Budapest is that it is a city that needs to let go of its deeply toxic relationship with grass-cutting: even sharp slopes which would be frankly dangerous to use a strimmer on had been almost scalped bare. The result did not achieve the presumably hoped-for neatness, but made the slope look more unkempt than a bank of grass or even weeds might have done. In general the city's wide streets make space for trees, but there is a certain parkland sensibility to the place which could do with a little more space for leaving things to grow.

Atop the centrepoint of the hill's crest, the Fisherman's Bastion itself might be one of the strangest constructions I've ever visited. It consists of a pretty 19th century church with a very brightly tiled roof, which is fronted on the river side by a bizarre array of little pseudo-medieval turrets along a bastion style wall with a wide central and smaller side staircases. The resulting effect is something that feels less medieval in the true sense and rather more clearly fantasy, a tourist-trap throng of people milling around something akin to a pre-conceived Disney castle or an attempt to make the Lego castle set out of actual stonework.

The bastion area includes a whole array of attempts to spin money off its looks: a man with a bird that will sit on your hand wanders around, and a café where one probably couldn't hear one's own thoughts given the outside throng occupies one of the better wall sections for views. Down a spiral staircase, a little underground pseudo-chapel section includes a medieval-themed tat shop. The main front steps of the bastion are a photographer's skill test for how on earth, if at all, one can get the desired shots without five similar groups getting into the background of the picture. Ticket offices and machines for the actual wall tour or church were meanwhile naturally mysteriously closed. I think that the bastion might best be done as an early morning trip to beat the crowds, or something done in full cosplay to make the most of the medieval silliness, or indeed both.

The bastion is, along with the castle, the centrepiece of the old town of Buda. Going further into the area there are various traditional restaurants (which I sadly did not try this time, my evening meals generally being focused in Pest). The area includes several more prettily-roofed buildings, including the heavy-set housing of the national archives by the Vienna gate at the north end, which I passed and looped around before finding myself at Buda tower.

Buda tower is the remaining tower of a medieval church, with the remains of its erstwhile walls lying as a sort of open paved plaza at its feet, including a cast-metal version of the Hungarian coronation cape the original of which I had seen earlier the same day. Climbing the tower is inexpensive and it can certainly be said for it that it offers some of the best views of the city as a whole. There are some downsides: when one gets to the top, not all of the windows are openable and fewer still are clean, making it hard to get the photography of the views that one might ideally want and falling rather short of the "panoramic" view suggested by the signage outside. The climb also isn't for the faint of leg, with several storeys of tower to clamber up and at least one point at which one is sure the top must be on the next floor only to find another several metres of ascending staircase. Nonetheless, it's consequently one of the best high points from which to look out over the city.

Descending the many steps and continuing my wandering back along the hilltop eventually meant reaching the castle, at the south end of old Buda. There, rather than (or perhaps accurately before reaching) the grandiose Habsburg magnificence of the palace, I was greeted mostly by heavy machinery and big boards blocking off the access to construction site areas. Whilst most of the castle itself is currently accessible, the area around it is a hive of building and rebuilding as different parts of the surrounding buildings are reconstructed and rebuilt to the satisfaction of the current generation of Hungary's elite.

I went to another place near to my apartment, Café Astoria, which presented a more formal restaurant style quite akin to old Viennese cafes and complete with a heavily moustachioed waiter. The options here included some Hungarian classics but were more generally in the restaurant food genre: I paid the equivalent of 21 euros for a duck roulade and a glass of wine, both of which were perfectly reasonable, and I would recommend the café if one wants that certain sort of early 20th century ambience.

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The place I was staying was right next to Budapest's Dohány Street Synagogue, and so on the morning of the second day that was my next stop. It is also known as the 'Great Synagogue', and it's not hard to see why – it's the second largest synagogue in the world, and stands out sharply from the buildings around it. It was constructed in the mid nineteenth century, in styles that echo Moorish Spain, with the building's Viennese architect intentionally selecting a non-European architectural style in what he saw as the absence of distinctly Jewish forms of architecture. The effect is stunning: the staid Habsburg architecture around it looks decidedly staid compared to the warm yellow façade and delicate decorations that the synagogue shows to the outer world.

The synagogue's exhibitions and displays celebrate quite prominently that Budapest was the birthplace of Theodor Herzl, the "spiritual father of the Jewish State" according to Israel's declaration of independence. Herzl's polemic argumentation in favour of a Jewish state in Palestine made him perhaps one of the most consequential political intellectuals of the last two centuries, though the contradictions and darker undertones to his writing – his scathing denigrations of Jews who preferred assimilationism or alternative forms of Zionism, or his ideal of an agrarian, combative masculinity inspired by Prussian military-aristocratic virtues – may be shadows still lingering darkly over his political project.

Perhaps the most striking thing that hit me about the synagogue itself was not the great size, or the sumptuous decoration, but the shape. There were pews and side aisles, a pulpit on the right, and a great visual centrepiece at the front. A synagogue has no fixed standard required for its shape: they require certain functions to be performed, but the space that they are performed in is highly variable. In other words, the fact that this synagogue was shaped like a Roman basilica, in turn the standard model for western European cathedrals, was a decisive and deliberate choice. It even has a huge pipe organ. Herzl, growing up around the corner, would have known from childhood this construction, a monument that echoed power and placed itself deliberately away from its surrounding world.

The dazzling exterior of the synagogue, even its enormous central hall, don't feel like its anchoring point, though. That place is in the courtyard. The Arrow Cross fascists deported over half of the Jews in the Budapest synagogue during the Second World War: a mixture of threats, pleading, and law-breaking by Jews and international officials saved somewhat under half of the two hundred thousand people who made up the city's Jewish community before the 1940s. Two thousand bodies are buried in the courtyard: they, and the impossible enormity of their loss, form the true anchor of history and emotion that underpins that place. Even in a culture that historically has been so known for the value it places on writing, there is so much of the story of Jewish existence – pain, yes, but also the ingenuity and survival and joy that can be built in defiance of such loss – that it may be beyond the written or spoken word to express.

The synagogue is a sobering, complex place, a delicately crafted piece of triumphal statement architecture wrapped around a sense and quantity of loss that no building could ever have been constructed to bear. The dreams of its architect and its most famous son were both a profoundly separatist ideal of victory and, yet, profoundly bound into this corner of European and its ideals and imaginaries. The synagogue, though, stands beyond those men and that narrative, memorialising human cruelty and community to an extent that grand dreams of nation and culture can only seem faded beside. Its manifold story is that of its people, of voices extinguished and unheard, of voices raised in cacophonous argument, of voices soaring in laughter and voices dimming in quiet hope. It is the graves in the courtyard, and the humanity they represented, that will stay with me from that place.

I had not actually eaten breakfast before going around the synagogue, and so decided it was time for another Hungarian dough product: in this case, chimney cake, or Kürtőskalács (pronounced approximately kurtosh-kolach) to give it the proper name. It is made of sweet dough wrapped around a spit and dipped in sugar, which caramelises during cooking. This has probably been done in eastern Hungary and Transylvania since the end of the medieval period: the sugared dough can also have other additions, such as chopped walnuts or pistachios (my preference), or if one has a sweeter tooth than I then sweet sprinkles or similar are also an option.

I returned to the Castle in Buda, making my way up the hill again and this time entering the building itself to look round its main museum. Buda castle pre-dates the Habsburg palatial sections that dominate its skyline: the whole edifice almost hangs off the southern end of the crest of Buda's hill, with sharp drops on several sides. It feels heavier and blockier than something like Vienna's Hofburg, perhaps in part the result of its fortress past, though it nonetheless contains the sort of  statue collection that gives the outside of the building a strongly imperial flavour.

Inside, one starts with some of the older elements of the castle, and the museum sections take in a variety of parts of its history, including the old medieval chapel, one of the lowest rooms in the castle which feels a quiet, small space compared to the grandiose halls high above it. Cellars and pattern-tiled halls fill the centre of the castle's history, before more recent upper levels present a more grandiose and recent part of it past.

The castle museum has more elements that focus on Budapest itself, whereas the National museum deals a little more with Hungary in general. This does not necessarily mean that it feels more smoothly integrated with its hinterland. Whether through its larger muslim population under Ottoman rule, the high historic German population of Buda, or the liberal-minded modern city's tensions with the country's deeply authoritarian government, the capital is undeniably different to its hinterland. This, too, however, is part of what it means to be a capital in historic terms. A capital is not just the reflection of a country, but an entity built for controlling one: a city may be large, or international, or wealthy on its own, but a capital is an intentional project. That means a capital needs to size up to its competitor cities – and needs to attract the artisan and mercantile classes necessary to show that it can compete. The capital's role as a power centre also means that a capital that truly does reflect the mood of a country is a dangerous thing. Keeping a seat of power surrounded by minorities with much to lose if the polity no longer offers them its toxic brew of protection, favour, and exploitation has at various historical moments been a strategy employed across Europe and beyond. In turn, though, this coupled with the pull of cities for the young and ambitious can equally lead to modern capitals uniquely clashing with their governments, as more majoritarian forces seek populism rooted in national hinterlands rather than in their capitals.

I headed to a park to meet a friend for the later part of the afternoon, and ended up in a conversation after gently answering an out-loud question from another tourist who was wondering about the river and why people swam in Vienna but not here (the current in the Danube is too strong for safe swimming even in Vienna, and is stronger by the time it reaches Budapest: Vienna's river swimming happens in a side-channel which is dammed at both ends greatly reducing the flow). In the conversation she turned out to be a Cyprus-dwelling Armenian from Lebanon who had memories of school in the 1970s in Vienna and late nights at Budapest airport flying east in her younger days. When writing the story of a place, especially in the modern period, this is the sort of story that is very hard to capture but very important in what a city means to different real people: places exist not just as units in space but as ties in the weave that joins humanity. Whatever the large pictures of state and nation, cities are still collections of people first and foremost. We talked as we crossed the final bridge stretch to the island, and then I bade her and her companions farewell and waited by the musical fountain, which as the name suggests, plays a wide variety of music with associated water displays.

The park contains sufficiently many features that I can't claim to have seen all by any means, but we visited a small micro-zoo that contained some deer, a couple of horses, a wildfowl enclosure, some storks, peacocks, and prey-birds. As much as I love seeing animals, the sight was not entirely comfortable: I think the storks for example, unmoved by the humans around them, must have been pinioned (wing-clipped) to prevent them flying, a practice I am quite dubious about the ethics of. I also didn't think the birds of prey had enough space, and the ducks may have been in a similar position. Many ducks can interbreed (though such hybrids are often infertile themselves), and if one knows what the parent species ought to look like it is often easy to see what a hybrid duck's parentage is likely to have been. The sheer number of hybrids in this group certainly suggested a population mixing rather too much in a confined space. All this is not to say anything negative of the animals themselves, who were lovely: the deer were immensely sweet, the storks elegant, the ducks definitely ducks. Such animal enclosures are, however, probably something of a dying genre, and this is probably for the best.

Just along from the park were the Margitsziget (Margaret Island) monastic ruins. These told another part of Budapest's story. The convent on Margaret Island was founded in the 13th century in the wake of the Mongol invasion of Hungary – King Bela IV's army was mauled by the Golden Horde, and subsequently the king was chased as far as Dalmatia, but the death of Ögedei Khan caused the Mongols to turn back, the central politics of the pan-Eurasian empire being too important for Batu and his general Subutai to ignore and forcing them to travel to Karakorum for the qurultai that would elect his successor. Much of the rest of Bela's reign was spent trying to rebuild and re-equip his kingdom, and several new religious foundations on Margaret Island formed part of the spiritual and intellectual thrust of that effort, including Dominican and Franciscan foundations and a convent led by Bela's own daughter – Margaret, later Saint Margaret, whose name the island still carries, replacing its original name of Nyulak Szigete (Rabbit Island). Bela, having given his daughter to the church at the age of three, reportedly later attempted to rescind this and get the Pope to allow him to marry her off. Margaret had grown up to become a fantatically penitent young woman, and was having none of it: some have suggested that her extreme approach to penitence may have led to health problems and shortened her life, for she died aged only twenty-seven, four months before her father's passing. Hungary remembers Bela as a national renewer and his daughter as a saint: their tensions in life melting into the funerary procession of national myth-making as ever.

I wandered a bit further out from the centre in search of dinner that evening, and found myself wandering past bars and loud music and a sort of night-life I rarely see on a day to day basis. For me, this part of a city's life is something of an assault on the senses, a complexity of noise and volume that feels uncomfortable and stressful. Budapest has a much stronger reputation for clubs and bars than other cities in the region – though also a stronger reputation for scams, such as people suggesting going to private bars that will then charge extortionate amounts for drinks and ensure you pay up. The nightlife may be why its tourist clientele felt on average younger than the more demure cultural tourism that tends to be at the heart of Vienna's international appeal. It's important to appreciate, whatever my personal preferences, that this is a key part of urban life: the vibrancy and power of city communities is rooted in part in the much wider array of potential connections people can make, and for as long as record exists, this is how people make connections.

As for myself, I found a smaller café-bar where a man was playing the piano inside: I was given a perch on a tiny table outside the window, strangely close to a refined-looking couple dining on just the other side of the glass. I half-turned to the street to give them some privacy and, it being my last night, I ordered goulash and stared into the depths of a glass of red wine. There was little to be seen there, and for that – for a moment's velvet tranquility amid the cacophonous weight of people and history – I felt, suddenly, grateful.

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Hungary's capital, centre and soft underbelly of its national project alike, gives a sense of scale that few cities manage: even in much larger settlements, the actual grandeur of a place often gets lost. The imposed space of the Danube at its heart helps give the buildings a stronger presence than in any of the other European capitals I have visited, and the result is imposing, brash, and resolutely focused on corralling the complexity of its history into a constantly reinvented mythic heartbeat. The city itself has a sense of presence and strength – sometimes an ally to the powers that shaped it, but once one invests the capital into such a construct, permanently retaining its loyalty is another matter. Somewhere beneath the finery, Budapest dreams for itself, and few can say what lies in the deep, sleepless miasma of a city's innermost heart.

Budapest is not a city I love, because I have an instinctual mistrust of that demanding emanation of power that lies at its heart: but it is a city that fascinates me, one that I desperately want to understand, for much the same reason. How do we best live alongside the building and re-building of nations that happens around us and from which we can never fully extricate ourselves? How do we find ourselves as individuals among the dreams of Emperors and priests, living in the shadow that a capital projects? Be they ambling past the musical fountain and old ruins of Margaret Island, laughing at a cheap wine-bar in the side streets, or buried at the synagogue with the reverberations of their pain echoing to this day, it may be that the people of Budapest know the answers just as well as anyone ever will.

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Author's note: this trip actually happened in the middle of 2024, it's just taken me absolutely forever to get round to finishing the write-up. I'll try and add a few more photos at a later stage: I hope it's a vaguely interesting read in any case.