Budapest evening of Dec 10, 2019

For all the cities of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, it was customary to erect monuments to Empress Elizabeth, nicknamed Sissi. She was the wife of the last Kaiser, Franz Josef, and had a tragic fate. Her son committed suicide. He shot himself with his mistress. Then Sissy said: “I would like to die like him when the soul goes to heaven from a tiny hole in my heart, away from friends and relatives. ” Her desire was destined to come true. Anarchist Luigi Lukeni waited for the Empress on the dam in Geneva, where Sissy was incognito with her maid of honor. He hurt her with a small sharp file wound in the heart. At first, Elizabeth did not even feel pain, was able to stand up and turned around, was surprised that the attacker did not even tear off her jewelry. But soon she became weak, she fell and lost consciousness.

The Frederick Podmanitsky square received its current appearance only in 2019. Podmanitsky is a descendant of a noble Hungarian family and a famous fighter for the Hungarian self-national definition. Since the last reconstruction, they usually hold temporary photo exhibitions here. This part of the city was slightly not confident. Several trolleybus lines have had the last stop here, while the houses surrounded the area destroyed after the war stood for many years. Only the opening of the metro station in 1982 was a development for the square and the surrounding area.

At the end of the eighteenth century, the construction of a large building, nicknamed the Budapest Bastille, began on the site of the modern square. By the way, Austro-Hungarian forces placed the captive soldiers of Napoleon in this prison. After the turbulent events of the early nineteenth century in the calm years before the Hungarian war for independence from Austria, the wife of the famous politician and reformer Istvan Secheni planted a sycamore in the garden, which still grows here. In the mid-19th century, during the years of the war for independence from Austria, the first Hungarian Prime Minister, Lajos Battiani, was executed in prison. At the end of the nineteenth century, the prison building, which underwent many different uses from the gymnasium to maritime navigation offices, was demolished. On its place, a large beautiful square arranged with beautiful buildings around. These buildings still visible today, for example, the building of the National Bank and the Stock Exchange. After the First World War, when the Austro-Hungarian Empire ceased to exist, the square was called Freedom Square for the first time. It is very symbolic that the area on which there was a large prison of the old world began to be called the freedom square of the new world.

In 1946, the communist regime erected on the square a monument to Soviet soldiers liberating Hungary. Soon another monument appeared, which fakely expressed the grateful from the Hungarian people to the great Stalin. It was the monument to Stalin that Hungarians destroyed during the uprising against the Communists in 1956. The memorial to the Soviet soldiers was repeatedly desecrated, and a policeman was always on duty near it. An interesting fact: behind the monument, you can see a large outlet of the ventilation pipe. This pipe is the ventilation system of the underground bunker, which the Communists began to build in 1952. The construction was completed in 1963. Three years later, the shelter was connected to the Budapest metro. An air filtration system can produce four thousand cubic meters of clean air per hour. This amount is equivalent to one hundred and twenty sea containers.

The monument to Ronald Reagan on the Freedom Square marks for the Hungarians the end of the Cold War and the fall of the communist regime. Nevertheless, it would be correct to mention Mikhail Gorbachev or designate the monument for these two leaders who put an end to the difficult period of world history called the Cold War. But the Hungarians have enough another absurdity. One of them was a memorial to the victims of the German occupation, which caused a lot of arguments among Hungarians and caused protests against the reasons and circumstances behind its creation and erection on the Liberty Square.

The monument was first unveiled in 1934 and was dedicated to the Hungarian martyrs during the First World War. At the top of this monument is a stone coffin, and under the warrior, which symbolizes Hungary, the years 1918 - 1919 are engraved. In post-Soviet times, there was a monument to Imre Nagy - the head of the Hungarian government during the years of the anti-communist uprising. He was portrayed on a bridge leading to the parliament building. Imre Nagy was executed, and after the end of the Soviet period, he was rehabilitated. A historical monument was returned to the square, and on the flank side, it added the figure of a man defeating a dragon. The man is a symbol of the Hungarians who fought against communism. Everything is complicated in Hungarian identity.

On the building opposite the parliament, the Hungarians retained traces of bullets from guns of Soviet soldiers who crushed the uprising in 1956. Here in the gallery, you can find many commemorative tablets and busts of people who died for Hungarian freedom and independence. In the park next to the corner of this building is a monument to Imre Nagy. Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat who saved Jews during the German occupation of Budapest, is mentioned on one of the tablets. He disappeared without a trace in Soviet Russia.

Against the beautiful background of the building of the Budapest Parliament, a memorial to a whole group of people is visible in the parliamentary park. Although it is called the Kossuth memorial, it is dedicated to the events of the first Hungarian revolution and the war for independence from Austria in the middle of the nineteenth century. Miklós Horthy opened the first monument on this site in 1927. This monument caused a lot of controversies, including disputing Lajos Kossuth as the leading political figure of these events. It is noteworthy that Lajos Batthyány, the first prime minister who was executed in prison on the site of the current Freedom Square, was depicted only among the other figures of the strugglers of freedom. The monument did not survive more than fifty years, and the Soviet rulers of Hungary decided to replace it. The new communist monument depicted Lajos Kossuth pointing his hand into the distance - in the brightening communist future. It is not at all obvious for Hungarians that a historical monument replaced the entire sculptural composition, and this also causes quite a bit of controversy.

Noble Hungarians advocated the construction of the parliament building even before the events of the war against Austria for Hungarian independence of the mid-nineteenth century. But only after the founding of Budapest in 1873, work began on the planning of the building. The Budapest Parliament is an excellent example of neo-Gothic architecture. About forty kilograms of gold and forty thousand tons of bricks were used in its construction. Construction took place twenty-one years, but the architect Imre Steindal died five weeks before the grand opening of his masterpiece.

This is one of the most powerful and piercing monuments in the world - This is how the international press described the memorial to the victims of the Holocaust on the Danube embankment opened in 2005. At this place, militants from the Nazi Hungarian Party "Crossed Arrows" were murdering Budapest Jews. The killings took place from the summer of 1944 to the winter of 1945. At the same time, Adolf Eichmann came to Budapest to organize the sending of transports with Jews to Auschwitz. The exact number of victims killed on the embarkment is not known. In less than a year, the Nazis and their Hungarian collaborationists liquidated about half a million Hungarian Jews. Hungarian militias were transporting Jews by trucks from the ghetto to the embankment. The victims took off their shoes and then have been shot. The bodies fell on the barge or directly into the river. The barge was driven away down the river, and the bodies were thrown into the water. The Soviet troops liberated Budapest and the Jewish ghetto on January 18, 1945. The most significant action took place on the night before the liberation. The shoes are made of cast iron, according to the models of shoe magazines in Budapest in 1940.

The dark, unlit old building in the very center of the city has an interesting history. It was ordered by the Vienna insurance company Angkor as a Budapest headquarters in the early nineteenth century. Everyone who has been to Vienna is familiar with the famous anchor watches in the old city that were created to popularize this insurance company. The building in Budapest was transformed into a residential building during the communists. It had communal apartments in the former offices of clerks. To this day, the building has not been restored and poses a threat to life.