Budapest | Travelogue

Part 1 of 3: "Arrival". Travel essay & photography. Started 6.24.26; finished 7.11.25.

Part Two, click here:

Part Three, click here:

Budapest is a city made in the image of the Old Gods, then abandoned to their trickster cousins. 

On the street level, graffiti vies for attention with loud signage discounting services and tourist amenities. A younger, trendier, cosmopolitan city is visible - pho shops and bubble tea stands rub shoulders with souvenir stores and café-style bars. There’s even an escape room: an A-frame sign on one inconspicuous block directs pedestrians to a courtyard entrance with advertising for eldritch horrors and pulse-pounding puzzle-solving. The modern age hasn’t skipped out on Budapest: on the peoples’ level, low to the ground, Budapest is moving with it.

As the buildings rise through their upper stories, Austro-Hungarian Glory resumes its command of the skies and roofs. Statues with fluid, neoclassical forms; elaborate cornice moldings; masterful stonemasonry and wrought-ironwork, beautiful in exactitude - none of these are reserved for the elite. They live on off-the-way apartments, civil service outposts; above nemzeti corner-stores selling nips and tallboys and cigarettes. They are sewed up into the fabric of the place.

On Andrássy Avenue, two immense sculptures of toga-clad women fit for the Parthenon or Coliseum flank the storefronts to Gucci and Moncler. They leave a defining image of the offhand pact being forged between New Money and Old Beauty all over Budapest.

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At the height of Solstice, Budapest is dry, full of dust and heat. Later in the weekend, I ask Máté, a local at the wedding I’m in town for, if it snaps cold during the winter months. He assures me it does. “Very far from the sea,” he points out.

He continues. “When we were kids, there used to be snow up to here” - he holds a hand up around his knee - “and we would always play in it, go sledding. But now…”

“Yes,” I say. “Same in America.”

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Few places have risen higher or fallen further than Budapest over 150 years of human history. From 1870 to 1918, a pluralistic and mobile society, well-positioned for economic success alongside new rail lines and the Danube River, hit a fine stride. It made effective use of new urban design principles, and built up Pest into a new layout through its wealth; concurrently, it became a center for arts of all varieties, and Roma and Jewish intellectualism in particular. It’s been said that Budapest in its belle epoque had the opulence of Vienna and the salon culture of Paris - and was each place’s equal, if not superior, in those categories.

Cut to the end of World War I, and Hungary’s occupation by Romania after a period of internal strife. Cut to 20+ years of decadent rule by a Romanian-installed “Regent” named Miklós Horthy, who failed to install just or lasting peace. Budapest fell to the control of the fascist Arrow Cross party next, then proceeded to exercise its power through a parliamentary sham government under the Soviet thumb. A revolutionary attempt at regime change, squelched in 1956, resulted in 33 more years of complicity with Moscow. Hungary remained a restless subject-state, however, and in 1989, it pulled off something quite remarkable: a bloodless transfer of power, from Soviet diktat to a parliamentary government seated in Budapest, years before the collapse of the USSR. Hungarians, I’m told, refer to this as “the System-change”, and take pride in being able to divest themselves of Communism so neatly.

The promise of ‘89 must look a long way off to older Hungarians. In 21st-century politics, Hungary has become defined by a reactionary illiberal government’s ascendance to a position of near-total rule, following an election in 2010 and a series of constitutional reforms in 2011. “Christian democracy,” as practiced by Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz party, began with moves to limit the independence of the judiciary, the elections system, and the media. It continued by predicating its rule on ethnic and racial exclusion. Orbán’s draconian methods for expelling Syrian migrants during their exodus from Al-Assad were how I came to know and hate his government; those policies were (and remain) proof-positive of all I find detestable about nationalist politics.

In maintaining the democratic backsliding engineered through his “reforms”, Orbán has devolved the country’s operation into a system of favors-trading and patronage known (now sarcastically) as the System for National Cooperation, and referred to in Hungary by its acronym, NER. NER, by any objective measure, has made the country poorer and less functional; it’s also engendered a sort of cynicism and hopelessness on the country's young left flank comparable to America’s.

Budapest rejected the NER-people and Fidesz leadership in a 2019 local election, only to see Fidesz lever its substantial electioneering advantages into a supermajority in 2022’s national elections. Whether illiberalism will help Fidesz consolidate that power - or lead it to overreach and demise - remains undecided.

What is certain is that 9.59 million Hungarian lives ride with its fate.

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I fly into Ferenc Liszt airport under no cloud cover. The weather will get hotter over the weekend, tipping high into the 90s, but it is plenty hot enough already. Budapest’s saving grace lies in its reversion to cool over the evening: the heat clings to the edges of each night, but by dawn each morning, the mercury reads below 60°.

The taxi driver the hotel’s dispatched to greet me after Customs runs into a systems glitch while paying for his short-term parking - “This has never happened, I swear,” he mutters, frustrated in a relatable way by glitchy IT - so it's a 40-minute waitaround in desiccated parking lot air before we’re finally underway. The dominant feature of the first part of the drive, repeated at regular intervals, is a billboard with sinister high-contrast B&W images of Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelenskyy and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. Text accompanying the images exhorts Hungarians to distrust Ukraine’s bid for membership: “They would bring Ukraine into the EU, but we would pay the price!” blares the messaging. “Let’s vote no!”

An AP article I find reveals the intention behind this propaganda: Orbán’s Fidesz party is losing ground in recent polls to Tisza, a splinter-party led by a former Fidesz man, and is attempting to use anti-Ukrainian sentiment as a wedge issue to drive up mistrust of Tisza’s motives. It’s an old tactic, straight out of the first chapter of the ethnonationalist playbook. This doesn’t mean it won’t prove successful. Autocrats can buy a lot of airwaves, and dictate a lot of public opinion.

In June ‘24, it was disclosed that Fidesz was Google’s single-biggest European ad buyer.

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Outside the Viktor of it all, there is the still and calm of a peak-summer weekday. Budapest is laid out like most European cities of similar size: postcard appeal at the city centers, and the demands of modernity outside them. Farm country gives way to global box-store brands and outlet shopping, then suburbs and exurbs on Budapest’s margins. Apartment housing gradually grows taller; trolley-tracks start running down widening boulevards.

Soon we near the heart of Pest: the part of the city low-down on the Danube’s East bank, under the shade and protection of Buda’s fortress hills to the West. If you’ve been to Prague, you understand the basic geographic arrangement. This is the first of many such comparisons to the Czech Republic’s capital I clock over five days in Budapest; in each city, profligate Old World beauty leaves eyes big and breath short.

My driver is still shamefaced at the inconvenience posed by the airport’s parking system, and is especially attentive to getting my baggage and I to the hotel door, with much smiling and repeated apologizing. Any idea of aggravation at the lateness vanishes under such circumstances: he gets a good tip when I settle the bill at the end of the visit.

Part 2 of 3: "Union" will post tomorrow.