Budapest – a beautiful city with a dark past
Budapest is a beautiful city with some amazing architecture and a dark past. We’ve been here several times before so we opted out of the city tours that take you to Heroes Square and the heights of Buda and the castle overlooking the river. Here’s a look at that earlier trip.
On a beautiful sunny day we went for a walk along the river and saw the shoes memorial, a line of pairs of shoes (cast in metal) where mainly Jewish people were forced to remove their shoes, then lined up and shot, their bodies floating away down the Danube. Shoes were valuable during the war, so the killers often kept them to resell. Estimates suggest up to 20,000 people were killed in this way by the Hungarian fascist Arrow Cross regime in the final months of WW2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoes_on_the_Danube_Bank?
That evening we opted to eat at a bar that specialised in Langos, a popular Hungarian dish that kind of resembles pizza. It’s fried dough layered with sour cream, cheese, and some other toppings. Pete and I decided on a Mexican version – which meant it was covered in crumbled corn chips and slices of jalapeno peppers. We weren’t impressed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lángos
Next day we visited the famous Dohány Street synagogue. It’s an amazing building with a dark past because of the Nazis.
The Dohány Street Synagogue in Budapest, the largest synagogue in Europe, stands at the edge of the former Jewish ghetto established by the Arrow Cross regime during the final months of World War II. Tens of thousands of Jews were forced into this crowded district, where starvation, disease, and violence were common. When people died, there was often no safe way to transport bodies to a proper Jewish cemetery outside the ghetto. As a result, more than two thousand victims were buried in mass graves in the courtyard beside the synagogue. In Jewish tradition, burial within a synagogue complex is strictly forbidden, making the presence of this cemetery a stark reminder of the desperate and tragic conditions endured by Budapest’s Jewish community during the winter of 1944–1945.
It gives me goose bumps to think that things like that happened just 80 years ago. Since then there have been the massacres in Rwanda, the killing fields in Vietnam, slaughters in Ukraine… Civilization is a very thin veneer.
The synagogue itself is a beautiful building. I pointed out to Peter that there are no representations of people as you’d see in a Christian church, It’s something the Jews have in common with the Muslims.
I truly do not understand antisemitism. How can so many people fear and loathe people because they worship their God in a different way?
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If you’ve missed any of the posts for this trip, go here. Europe 2026
