A week in Budapest: well done those Magyars!

My recent hiatus in transmission was caused by a holiday with my sons in Budapest, one of my favourite cities. For those who don’t know it, it has that elegiac, fin-de-last-siècle-but-one, late-Habsburg atmosphere that Vienna has more or less grown out of. My aim was to fill a bit of a gap in my cultural grasp of south-eastern Europe; this was shared to some extent by son A, a history buff like myself, while son B was delighted to find that opportunities for eating chips and pizza, watching DVDs and Premiership footie and sleeping all day are also not lacking in Budapest.

The best thing about Budapest are the Turkish baths, which really are Turkish; it was only the occupying Ottomans in the 16th and 17th centuries who developed the ubiquitous hot springs, and the baths’ survival in largely original form provoked me to say The more modern baths are all mixed-sex and swimming-costumes; as a stern traditionalist I regarded a single-sex party as essential, which is why I took the sons and left the lady wife at home. In the older baths men sit around in white aprons, sagely and reflectively steaming, some of them even fatter than me. Highly civilised. Best of all is that the baths have remained but Islamic law hasn’t, as after two hours’ steaming one could murder a beer. (I never thought I’d hear this from my own lips, but there may be something to be said for an Islamic conquest and occupation, provided that it doesn’t go on too long.)

A more recent occupation has also been dealt with rather well by the Hungarians. In 1989 they found themselves with a large amount of socialist-realist statuary which had suddenly become surplus to requirements. Instead of breaking it up to build public conveniences, or leaving it to decay and disappear under avian crap, they lugged it all out to a little park some way out of town and re-erected it all, the pretensions of its sculptors and sponsors looking even more ridiculous in this setting than they would anyway, a hyperexample of reach exceeding grasp. Well done, the Magyars.