Settling back in Budapest, I got right down to the business of not only cracking down and finishing the last bits of data collection I needed to do for my research—late night phone calls to British Columbia—but I was also determined to get back to learning Hungarian. I had left Budapest for London during the middle of my very last class and felt as if I had lost all of my skills.
But something seems to have shifted re my language skills and, as a result, my experience here in Budapest. My second day back I made my way to the vásárcsarnok (the market hall) where there is a million square feet of fruits, vegetables, salami, cheese, butchers, bakers and paprika:
This is it, I thought, a chance to get back into the swing of things. This is the kind of place where you tell the sales person what you want–which items and how much of each—and you stand there and point and speak while they put things in bags and weigh things for you. There’s no hiding behind a western-style grocery store that involves almost no human interaction.
And there I was, ordering my apples in kilograms, my cabbages is half-heads, my meat in decagrams (wtf Hungary?), my buns in darabs (pieces). And the salespeople were actually speaking to me, in Hungarian, asking me where I was from, what am I doing in Hungary, telling me I speak Hungarian well, etc (*note no questions about exactly where I’m staying or if I am married). One salesman even kindly threw in a free bunch of dill. Later that week, numerous other opportunities to practice speaking turned into warm and welcoming conversations.
This may seem trite, but let me tell you, Hungary is not THAT kind of country…you know, the kind that immediately cares you are there and welcomes you warmly with open arms and feeds you (unless you are a Hungarian’s foreign significant other—I’ve heard that is a different story entirely). Something has shifted in how I’m approaching Hungarians and how they’re approaching me; being here feels, amdist the increasingly chilly fall air, suddenly warmer.
A freedom-themed day
October 23rd was a major National Holiday commemorating the anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. To-date, all I had known about this popular, grass-roots, spontaneous uprising against the Russians was that it led to a mass exodus of Hungarians dispersed to Canada, the States, and Australia. Of course, this commemoration day, I learned much more about this pretty important historical event that some call the first tear in the iron curtain.
Not only was I keen on engaging in some of the festivities on this uniquely Hungarian holiday, but I had spent the previous day letting jet lag finally catch up to me, sleeping the whole day, and was craving some health and wellness. I woke up before sunrise on the 23rd and bundled up, donned some good walking shoes, and made my way across the Szabadság Híd (translates: Freedom/liberty Bridge), the Hungarian flags lining it flapping in the chilly pre-dawn air.
At the other end of this bridge is the foot of Gellért Hill:
….a small hill hosting the Szabadság Szobor (Liberty monument) as well as a 360 degree view of Budapest:
And here I watched the sunrise:
Then made my way down the hill:
…and wandered through the serene, early morning streets of downtown Budapest towards the Parliament:
…in search of a cozy breakfast place. Being early in the morning AND a holiday, I was sensing that I would be unlucky in this endeavour, the only glimmer of breakfast-hope being the Four Seasons Hotel’s 40 dollar American breakfast. Eventually I found a lovely spot, the only spot open, Liberté Budapest Grande Café (ha! Funny I didn’t even register at the time that this was yet another freedom-themed part of my day).
After some much-needed nosh, I headed a few streets over to the Parliament and Kossuth Lajos Square for the 9 am colours parade. Now I’m not usually interested in military things, you know growing up with it and all, but of course when in a different country it is always interesting to see “the show”. All of the elected officials were crowded onto a massive stage, the Prime Minister and the President in the center of the stage, all in their dark-coloured overcoats. Marching band music blasted in the square of the monolithic, beautiful yet ominous parliament building while the drill sergeant barked drill commands in Hungarian into a microphone. While it was a blue-bird day, had it been a cloudy, winter-y, snowy day it would have had the ambiance of what I assume (from the movies) a full-on scary commie dictatorship.
As I stood waiting for the parade to start, I heard a man beside me say in English and point to a spot near the parliament building, “that’s where I was standing 60 years ago”. I struck up a convo with him and his wife. He was Hungarian and had been part of the revolution when he was a 20 year-old professional water polo player. He ultimately escaped to Austria and fled to the United States as anyone who was involved, after the Russians sent in their tanks and pummeled the revolutionaries, had the chance of being executed.
As the soldiers raised the flag, the band began to play the national anthem. Old men all around me were singing loudly. One old man behind me began crying. My new Hungarian revolutionary friend turned back towards him and quietly and comfortingly said to him, “én is, én is (me too, me too)”, also staving off tears.
I would continue learning about the revolution that day and come to realise how everyday ordinary teenage boys and girls, men and women, basically picked a war with the Red Army. This was not just an incidence of a few shootings and executions, beatings and tear gas as I had been imagining it. The people violently rose up for a few days, many were killed. The Russians seemed to have retreated and the Hungarians thought they had won for few days. Not to be outdone, the Russians returned in a ridiculous and symbolic show of force, sending thousands of tanks and hundreds of thousands of Russian troops into the city. The “freedom fighters”, as the world began to call them during the uprising, were obliterated quickly and fiercely:
Thousands of people died in the streets, more were wounded, and hundreds executed. Because my 11-year old father was a few years too young to have been one of the young teenagers to pick up a Kalashnikov or sneakily throw Molotov cocktails into the hatch of a Russian tank, he has never, or has never been able to elaborate on the extensive fighting that ensued in this urban trench. He has only really mentioned remembering playing on the Russian tanks, but we always thought dad was full of shit. As I’m coming to learn, dad’s memories, snippets of his past he has shared, as truly outlandish as they have all sounded (for example, that his stepfather, Gusti, had been a trapeze artist in the Hungarian circus—well this one has not been verified—yet), have been slowly verified within the last few years, much to my family’s surprise.
After the the colours parade, I headed to the House of Terror at Andrássy Út 60 (Andrassy Boulevard, house number 60). This was the location where the AVO (Hungarian secret police) would bring the anti-communist sympathizers, and whoever else really, to be interrogated, imprisoned, tortured. In fact, between 1945 and 1956, it is estimated that one in three Hungarians at some point, had been rounded up in the middle of the night and brought here for questioning (the revolutionaries conducted a full-on massacre on this secret police force during the few short days of the fighting). Andrássy Út 60 has since been turned into a museum about this period following the war. On this, the 60th anniversary of the revolution, entrance was free. I arrived on the metro a few minutes before it opened thinking that obviously it’d be busy, but not too bad. Yes, well the line up was down the street and around the corner for at least two blocks (like those loser-lineups for the latest I-phones) and reminded me that I am indeed in an ex-communist country:
And so I opted for just reading the interpretive boards outside of the Museum that told a brief history of the revolution and retreated back to my apartment.
I spent the rest of the day finishing the last bit of a book I’ve been reading, Under the Frog, by British-Hungarian Tibor Fischer. In it he describes, through historical fiction and a dark sense of humour, the revolution and the escape of the Magyar protagonist.
In the evening, Viktor Orban (the Prime Minister), was set to give a public address outside of the parliament. I thought about attending but wouldn’t have been able to understand him anyways. Besides which I wanted to make some phone calls home. So I skipped it.
Now, the day before I returned back to Budapest from Toronto, there had been a fairly large protest in Budapest against the closure of a long-standing left-leaning liberal newspaper, the Népszabadság (Traditional Freedom) a couple of days earlier. This paper allegedly began publishing right at the time of the revolution and now it had been shut down, overnight, sixty years later, with financial viability cited as the reason. Reporters showed up to work one morning and no longer had access to their offices, their computers, and they couldn’t even access the online archives. Some argue that it was at the bidding of the government that it was shut down because the paper had begun to unravel some sort of financial corruption within the government (WOW! What a newsflash!!). I was sad to have missed this protest by one day because I’ve just never experienced a good solid, large Euro-style protest.
On October 23rd, during Orban’s speech that I skipped, the Together Party, a social liberal party, had organised a peaceful protest in which people started blowing literal whistles during his speech. I assume they were protesting him in general for all the tiny little baby step-moves he’s been making that are arguably undemocratic. Evidently there were some bothered Orban supporters and a few bloody beatings occurred—not police beatings, just civilians in disagreement with one another. Hmmmm…. perhaps when I do finally get to a big protest I’ll watch it all happen from around the sidelines.
Talking to my father later that evening, on that commemorative day, and after learning so much about how bloody this revolution actually was, I asked my father what the heck he was doing while he was here in Budapest and all this was going on. Apparently, the basement of his apartment building had been turned into a place to look after the wounded and where the women and children rocked out for a few days during the fighting. I can’t imagine what that must have been like for a child, too young to fight, but not too young to recall the events….not to mention the subsequent journey to flee the country to Austria. My father has never seemed too distraught by any of it, though. He mostly has recollections of being well-looked after in the refugee camp, enjoying the regular meals he received there and on the ship en route to Canada, a veritable bonanza in the eyes of a child who had been born into and grew up in the darkest days of post-war, communist Hungary, I suppose.
Some newspaper sources about the protests I mentioned in no particular order because I don’t have to:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/oct/09/protests-in-hungary-at-closure-of-main-leftwing-opposition-newspaper
Government supporters assault protesters at official 1956 memorial event
