Anyway, we stepped onto the second class car and were immediately greeted by the powerfully fragrant smell of a latrine. I'm not sure what had happened in that bathroom, but it wasn't good, and I worried about the gastrointestinal health of its last occupant. Thankfully, we were able to find a cabin halfway down the hall so the smells couldn't reach us. What did reach us, however, was a quartet of flamboyant Hungarian 20-year olds, and if American stereotypes about sexual preference and behavior hold true in central Europe, then these young men were both very gay, and very gay. As best we could tell, they were singing Hungarian show tunes, and my yin and I could only assume that they had been up all night. They were loud but not obnoxious, or rather, their obnoxiousness was not annoying. Besides, once the train got moving, they soon passed out piled on top of one another in the cabin next door. They didn't rise again until we were pulling into the station:
Exiting the train, we found ourselves flocked by cab drivers holding hand scrawled cardboard signs - "TaXi." This attention only intensified, of course, after we stopped to document our arrival:
Arriving in Budapest is totally different than arriving in Prague or Vienna, whose points of entry look ostensibly like any large city in western Europe. For starters, Budapest smells. Not in a bad way, but the air is full of spices and sweets and the savory smell of sizzling meats. This initial impression of strangeness was only reinforced once we exited the station onto the streets. In Prague, the traces of the Soviet era have been largely eradicated, but in Budapest it's apparent everywhere you look, from the antiquated trams:
To the soot-covered buildings:
On top of this, the language is utterly and hopelessly impossible, with at least two dozen combinations of accents pointing in every imaginable direction. According to the book we brought with us, the Magyar people are fiercely proud of their native tongue and reluctant to learn foreign languages, which limits the introduction and assimilation of non-Magyar words. Furthermore, unlike other languages in the region (Czech, for instance) that had to be rebuilt and revived in the 19th Century after being nearly eradicated by German-speaking Austrian domination, Magyar has remained relatively untouched by outside domination. I guess this makes sense – it was called the Austro-Hungarian Empire after all. Finally, etymologically speaking (pun intended), Magyar is Uralic language rather than Indo-European, which means it has a different mother and father than the Germanic languages, the Romance languages, and the languages of the Indian subcontinent. All this, at least according to this book, makes Magyar the most foreign language written using the Roman alphabet.
The point of all this is that we found it nearly impossible to keep any Magyar words in our head whatsoever because they are so strange that one can't even think of a clever phonetic mispronunciation to make it stick. To summarize - Magyar is awesome.
Anyway, we managed to make our way from the train station to the subway, then to the tram, then to our hotel, which was easily the nicest I've ever stayed in:
With free mineral water and espresso in the lounge:
A giant bed:
And an open shower with rainfall shower head that helped wash away the memory of Vienna's low clearance equivalent:
To top it off, the U.S. dollar is relatively strong against the Hungarian forint, which meant that this 4-star hotel cost about the same as your typical Holiday Inn back in the States.
With our bags stored at the hotel, my yin and I headed out into the city, gradually making our way to the Jewish quarter, and eventually arriving at our destination:
Which is has been around since the 1800s and is the second largest synagogue in the world (NYC's Temple Emanuel is the largest). Technically, it's called the Dohány Utcai Zsinagóga ("Tobacco Street Synagogue"), but as the following images demonstrate, it has earned its more familiar moniker, Budapest's Great Synagogue:
And that weird side pulpit preaching thing:
There's good reason for this. The congregation hired a goy architect back in the day to design the synagogue, and this is just one part of its strange history. Back in WWII, for example, the Nazi SS set up a command post in the balcony area above the entrance:
This ended up being very good for the Great Synagogue because it prevented it from being bombed either by the Allies, which is why it survived the war in relatively good shape.
The same cannot be said for Hungarian Jews, however, and if one can speak of comparisons within something so singularly horrifying, their story is one of the most disturbing of the Holocaust. Jews prospered in Budapest between the First and Second World Wars, coming to dominate the city's economic and intellectual life. This bred resentment, and starting in 1938 a series of anti-Semitic laws were enacted. Things grew much worse in 1944, however, when the Hungarian government was replaced by a puppet Nazi regime. The Arrow Cross Party was legalized, and the deportation of Jews to camps (primarily Auschwitz) began. By the time Budapest was liberated by the Soviets in 1945, over 70% of the pre-War Jewish population was dead. The vast majority of them died in the final six months of the war, well after its outcome was already decided.
The areas next to the Great Synagogue commemorate the Hungarian Jews and include everything from this modern stained glass artwork that evokes the flames of the Holocaust (which literally means "to burn completely" in Greek):
One monument is dedicated to Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who saved hundreds of Jews during the war and was subsequently recognized as one of the "Righteous Among Nations" by Israel. This honorific is bestowed upon non-Jews who took actions to help Jews during the Holocaust. Tragically, Wallenberg was arrested by the authorities post-liberation and died in a Soviet work camp in 1957:
There is also a garden comprised of multiple large rectangles and surrounded by small headstones. In the freezing months leading up to the Soviet liberation in January of 1945, the bodies of Jews who died in the ghetto were left to freeze on the streets surrounding the Great Synagogue. After the liberation and in acccordance with Jewish law, these people were buried in mass graves that are known today as Heroes Garden Cemetary:
Perhaps most impressive was this tree, which simultaneously evokes a weeping willow and an upside down menorah:
Each leaf is made of stainless steel and is etched with a single name:
This was one of the most emotional, engaging memorials/artworks I have ever seen, and my yin and I were fortunate enough to be there just as the sun began to drop low in the sky, casting long shadows over the courtyard like the working of time itself:
Until the tree itself was eclipsed by the shadow of Heroes' Temple, which was built in 1931 to commemorate the contribution of Hungarian Jews in World War One:
Next, my yin and I walked into the small museum adjoining the Great Synagogue, which housed hundreds of years of religious paraphernalia:
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| Dig the shofar. |
And other historical objects, such as these knives used for a 19th Century Bris:
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| Ouch! |
Of course, there were also more troubling exhibits, like these holy vestments that had been repurposed as prison clothes and baskets:
And grim statues of worried men:
After all this, my yin and I were ready for something a little lighter so on our way back to the hotel we stopped by this unassuming storefront to do a little shopping:
What we discovered, however, was Ishtvan, and in the next half hour I learned more about the history of Hungary than I ever did in AP European History. For instance, Hungary is called "Hungary" because when western Europeans finally made their way back this far east, they mistook the Magyars for the Huns (as in Attila the) and the rest is history.
(By the way, the Magyars do not call their nation Hungary).
While my yin tried on a dress, Ishtvan told me about visiting the brothels in Shanghai when he was a younger man, his demanding Japanese wife, and how he can no longer travel because he was caught smuggling passports back into the country. When she came out, he excused himself to an alcove behind the cash register and came back with a jug of Magyar moonshine.
"Cherry and plum," he told me. "Two milliliters is medicine, two hundred is poison. Welcome to Budapest."
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