Back from Budapest #2

Hello Subscribers – and welcome new ones!

As I had announced in an earlier Newsletter, I went on a repeat visit to Budapest this past (long) weekend, again getting the train from Vienna on Saturday morning and retuning on Monday evening. For my previous Budapest trip I made this DT Blog post, as well as this Newsletter, and on my main website all relevant Budapest chapters have meanwhile been updated and new subchapters added, as outlined and hyperlinked in this recent Newsletter.

Now I have to make further amendments, based on what dark-tourism (DT) activities I did in Budapest this time around. The main things were these: finally visiting the Hungarian National Museum, seeing the exhibition “1914-1922 – A New World Was Born”, exploring the Kozma Street Jewish Cemetery on the outskirts of the city next to the New Municipal Cemetery, and revisiting Kerepesi Cemetery, now renamed Fiumei Road Cemetery.

In addition, I also saw yet more memorial monuments and will add relevant bits and photos to the main Budapest chapter.
  

Of the two museums, the Hungarian National Museum was a little disappointing. While it is rich in older history and has plenty of rare artefacts on display, the sections of more relevance to dark tourism, i.e. the modern history parts, ca. from the beginning of the twentieth century, were a bit brief and superficial. The section about the 1956 uprising was probably the best here. The Holocaust, in contrast, was barely mentioned (but then again, Budapest has its own memorial centre dedicated wholesale to that topic).

The exhibition “1914-1922 – A New World Was Born”, on the other hand, was more impressive than I had anticipated, especially for its incredibly visual appeal. That had its downside, though: photography was not permitted! In fact, I had tried contacting the site in advance and asked for a photo permit (as their website said they’d grant that to journalists and researchers who want to write about the exhibition), but I never had a reply. I went anyway, and on the ground floor I was at first able to take pictures unhindered, but once on the first floor, a museum warden told me “no photos!” and I had to put my camera away. From then on there were also other “security guards” keeping a close eye on visitors, so I wasn’t able to systematically capture images of the installations on the first and second floors – with one exception: the picture featured above (taken surreptitiously). It’s of an installation signifying the Spanish flu pandemic at the end of WW1. So, given that we’re not yet through with the current Covid pandemic, I thought that was a fitting image to choose here.

The Kozma Street Jewish Cemetery was a little less visually appealing than other Jewish cemeteries I’ve visited (e.g. in Warsaw), but there were a few interesting pieces of sepulchral art, and the Holocaust monument in the cemetery grounds was of course also highly relevant to DT.

Kerepesi Cemetery (I’m sticking with the old established name for now) was good to revisit because I saw other parts of it I hadn’t seen before (including the Soviet war graves section) and I tracked down a few relevant particular graves, such as the monumental one for Ignaz Semmelweis (see Semmelweis Museum). I also spotted a very recent new grave, namely that of Hungarian-born Hollywood legend Zsa Zsa Gabor!
  

DT duties aside, it was just lovely to be back in gorgeous Budapest, one of my favourite cities in the world. My wife and I had a fabulous dinner at one of the most established, traditional Hungarian Jewish restaurants and enjoyed some outstanding craft beers at various outlets, including at the actual Mad Scientist brewery’s beer garden. They were very surprised to see some foreign tourists there, as the place is quite hidden behind a largely abandoned former industrial complex (I would have loved to go urbexing inside – but that was not an option). In fact I found the location by chance when I zoomed in on that complex on Google Maps after my previous Budapest trip when I had spotted the grand old industrial red-brick architecture from the tram going to the New Municipal Cemetery. This time I made sure I had a stop there.

Brewery-wise, the absolute highlight was an extreme creation, a “Thai mango salad mead”. The staff were all in awe of it, after it had arrived freshly made only the day before. I asked whether it would be available in bottle or can to take away, and they smiled broadly and explained that instead the limited supplies would go into a lottery amongst subscribed members of Mad Scientist only, and none would be publicly available. In other words, it already was a collector’s item only a day after it had been made, and the supplies on tap at the brewery were gone by the same evening (as I was told the next day by a waiter in their city centre bar). So we were quite privileged to have tasted it there and then. One of the most memorable brews ever, certainly the most interesting mead I’ve ever encountered.
  

But I digress from the topic of dark tourism. I’ll now work on the extras for Budapest before returning to the writing up of Kosovo. I will also make another Blog post on that – over the next coming two or three weeks (please bear with me), before I then head off on my long summer break to Namibia at the end of the month … But there will be at least one more Newsletter before then, promise …

Anyway, so much for this time.

All the best,

Peter