You might be wondering why I’m including two major cities in one post. The fact is, I didn’t get to see much of either of them. I developed a sore throat that interrupted my sleep during the voyage to Vienna. With an eye on the bus trip through Eastern Europe, starting in three days’ time, I worked on getting better by staying on the ship. Pete went on the tour to Schoenbrunn Palace (no photos allowed), but neither of us attended the concert, which by all reports, was very good.
Pete was very interested in the Empress Maria Therese (she of Schoenbrunn Palace) and bought a book for us to look at. It’s rare to find powerful females in history and this one (unlike Elizabeth 1 of England) was a fecund mother as well as a ruler, having sixteen children, ten of whom survived. I suppose you could compare her to Queen Victoria. The last of the Habsburgs, she managed to fend off all the boys who tried to take her dominions.
All is not lost, though. You can read the Vienna blog from the 2015 tour for more insights into the capital of Austria.
Then it was off to Budapest, last port of the river trip. I was feeling a bit better and the weather was fine, so I thought joining the bus tour of the city might be okay. Wrong. Outside the bus, walking around in the fresh air, I was pretty good. But on the air-conditioned bus it was all I could do to control the coughing fits with throat lozenges.
That said, it was nice to walk around the Imperial areas of Buda, overlooking the river and Pest.
Our guide told us a wonderful story about the Soviet statuary, which is always rather ugly. The statue of freedom, high on the hill in Buda, is a case in point (see pic above). The Hungarians have come to terms with that one, acknowledging it’s a part of their history. But many of the Soviet era monuments were taken down. They weren’t destroyed, though. They have been placed into Memento Park, and visitors can go and see them in all their grotesque glory. It’s kind of like a cemetery for statues. (HaHa).
On Buda Hill our guide showed us a statue to the soldiers killed in the independence wars against the Habsburgs, commemorating the bravery of soldiers who fought in battles they lost.
On the drive through the city we passed the Jewish temple – the Dohany Street synagogue. It’s a magnificent building with Moorish influences, but it has a darker history, in keeping with the Holocaust elements of our trip to Europe. Rather than try to explain myself, this is a quote from the article about the building in Wikipedia.
“In 1944, the Dohány Street Synagogue was part of the Jewish Ghetto for the city Jews and served as shelter for many hundreds. Over two thousand of those who died in the ghetto from hunger and cold during the winter 1944-1945 are buried in the courtyard of the synagogue.
It is not customary to have a cemetery next to a synagogue, and the establishment of the 3,000 m2 cemetery was only the result of historical circumstances. In 1944, as a part of the Eichmann-plan, 70,000 Jews were relocated to the Ghetto of Pest. Until January 18, 1945, when the Russians liberated the ghetto, around 8,000 to 10,000 people had died, although, one part of the deceased were transferred to the Kozma Street Cemetery, but 2,000 people were buried in the makeshift cemetery. In memory of those who had died, there is a memorial by the sculptor, Imre Varga, depicting a weeping willow with the names and tattoo numbers of the dead and disappeared just behind the Synagogue, in the Raoul Wallenberg Holocaust Memorial Park.”
Many of the Hungarian Jews were taken to Auschwitz – but that’s a story for another day.
We made a brief stop at Hero Square to admire the tribute to the founders of the nation. I must say it does amuse me how the leaders of these tribes, who were without a doubt blood-thirsty warriors, ended up becoming saints after they converted to Christianity. St Stephen (Stephen 1) is one such. But his comrades in arms weren’t really convinced. After the king died, they stuffed his bishop into a barrel and threw it down the mountain in Budapest, thereby killing him. The place is now known as Gellert Hill.
Anyway, the monuments to the chieftains seems to be popular with the local lads, who climb up there to be photographed with one or other of the horsemen.
That evening my throat was on fire, and I didn’t go on deck to see Budapest by night. Pete did, though, and took some pretty reasonable photos with his trusty tablet. This trip showed us a few features of Budapest we didn’t see last time. That’s (of course) a trade-off. We drove past the opera house, but didn’t see inside. That’s all in the previous trip blog.
The following morning we would disembark and start the next phase of our tour, into Eastern Europe.
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