One of Budapest's most famous public sculptures is entitled Shoes On The Danube Bank. It was created by Can Togay, a film director, together with sculptor Gyula Pauer as a memorial to 3,500 people - 800 of them Jewish - shot into the Danube by Hungarian fascist group Arrow Cross in 1944 and 1945. The sculpture recreates 60 pairs of 1940s styled shoes in bronze and I found these very personal reminders of those who died to be an effectively poignant reminder. Arrow Cross were not Nazis and were highly critical of Hitler, but their white supremacist ideology led to similar bigoted actions and outrages. I was saddened to realise that, only seventy years later, humanity is already forgetting and allowing such groups to become influential again.
Anna Kethly statue
While in Vienna, Dave and I had commented on the vast number of statues depicting triumphant warmongering men. It's much the same in London and other cities and we wondered whether Western society would have evolved differently if more peaceful men or even (shock, horror) women had historically been given similar prominence. On that note I was pleased to spot this statue of Hungarian Socialist politician Anna Kethly. It was unveiled two years ago and is tucked away in Olimpia Park. Kethly was an incredible woman and I was happy to discover more about her life.
On a lighter note, we saved the most fun thing in Budapest for our last day there. I like a good fountain anyway, but the musical fountain on Margaret Island is fab! It is pretty impressive anyway but on the hour every day (during the summer months at least) it dances to music. Its repertoire ranges from classical to folk music to pop and rock. I loved how tightly the water jets are choreographed to the musical rhythms. One of the songs was Mungo Jerry's cheesy classic In The Summertime for which not only does the fountain fire on the beat, but the water landed on the beat too! Each show lasts about fifteen minutes and it's free! There are dozens of YouTube videos ...
Our third recent citybreak destination was Budapest in Hungary. We did discover that, not unexpectedly, exploring three cities back-to-back in twelve was A Bit Much so our energy levels flagged here!
Our Airbnb accommodation was a quirky studio flat owned by Bea and Bali. This was the easiest of our checkins as Bali was waiting in the street, waving, as we trudged up the hill with our rucksacks. The flat is well located for sightseeing and, had there not been builders working next door, would have been pretty peaceful too. It had everything we needed although cooking up meals could have been tricky because the kitchen wasn't particularly well equipped. Bali did bring us over a kettle though so we managed just fine. I loved the random vintage decor and sitting out on the roof decking in glorious sunshine. We got too lucky with the weather in Budapest - so hot we melted!
After only strolling down to the riverside to gaze over at the illuminated Parliament building on our first evening, we set out with a real sense of purpose for our first day. Just across the street from our apartment building was the start of a flight of steps leading up to Buda Castle and, I think, some of the oldest streets in Budapest. Some parts of this area are very touristy and others surprisingly empty and peaceful. I loved the white stone of the castle and churches against the blue sky, and the patterned tiled roofs one of which can be seen in this photo. We declined to climb a tall church tower near to here, but did admire an amazing bronze replica of a coronation cloak within its ruined walls. The original fabric cloak is in the national museum and, judging by the detail on its replica, the embroidery must be incredible.
Our highlight of the day was visiting a fascinating museum, The Hospital In The Rock, which is somewhere I think every Budapest visitor should tour. It costs about £11 a ticket, but is free for EU nationals aged 70 and over. Fortunately we got there pre-Brexit so Dave could take advantage of this! Originally a series of caves created by waterflow, the underground space was fitted out as a state of the art hospital for the Second World War and was repurposed as a Soviet nuclear bunker in the 1960s. Abandoned as a timecapsule for decades, it is now possible to join guided tours (in English or Magyar) of about a tenth of the facility. Some rooms atmospherically display the caves as a hospital, others contain bunker artefacts, one has a full-size helicopter, and there is also a harrowing Hiroshima exhibition - particularly timely as America and North Korea continue to trade potentially lethal insults. Unfortunately the museum forbids absolutely all photography, presumably because it would slow down the pace of tour groups, so I couldn't take any pics. Click through to the website to catch a glimpse inside.
Prior to visiting Vienna, a little of our research was watching the classic Orson Welles film of Graham Greene's The Third Man, filmed in the war damaged city in 1948. Of course there aren't piles of rubble everywhere now, but the iconic ferris wheel still stands in the Wiener Prater. This area of the city is now a large park - partly green space with sports facilities and walking/jogging trails and partly a funfair with dozens of terrifying-looking rides. Fortunately Dave and I think similarly about being flung upside-down dozens of feet up in the air so we stayed firmly on the ground while everyone else screamed above us!
I was a little disappointed by the lack of street art in Vienna. The city is built on a grand scale and has glorious avenues of impressive buildings, but mostly lacks the little streets and alleys where guerrilla artists hone their work. There are unexpected public sculptures though and I liked this army of bird boxes - Warten auf Vogel IV (Waiting for Birds IV) by Josef Bernhardt. It is part of an Art For All initiative which has artworks installed in odd locations. This one is on a wide street corner in an unassuming neighbourhood.
Most fun is an inventively decorated apartment block known as the Hundertwasser House after the artist who designed it, Friedensreich Hundertwasser. He worked with architects Josef Krawina and Peter Pelikan to create a wonderfully quirky structure. The Hundertwasser House is actually a residential building so visitors aren't allowed to go wandering around inside, but we loved being able to see the outside. Fab details include mosaiced pillars and an undulating cobbled street on which several selfie-taking tourists struggled to balance!
Another of our most memorable visits while in Vienna was our excursion to the Schoenbrunn Palace. This massive residence was once home to the ruling Habsburg dynasty and has to be seen to be believed! It is now a UNESCO world heritage site with much of the grounds and parkland open to the public for free, and part of the house viewable for a price. The two house tours are both accompanied by audioguides. The Imperial Tour takes visitors through 22 rooms and the Grand Tour takes in 40 rooms. We chose the Grand Tour and were glad to have done so because the most interesting room decor was in the later rooms after the two tours diverged! Photography within the house is forbidden so I can't show the sumptuous interiors here - although a quick Google will no doubt give you the idea!
Schoenbrunn Palace was originally built as a hunting lodge in the mid-1500s. Maria Theresa had it rebuilt and extended in the 1740s after she received the estate as a wedding gift and her family continued to occupy the Palace until the last Habsburg emperor was deposed in 1918. It has been a museum since the 1950s although only a few of the 1441 rooms can be seen. The audioguide is quite good albeit brief so we found there were artworks - tapestries especially - in some of the rooms about which no information was given and staff were few and far between. The overriding impression of the Palace for me was of a family spending more and more money to stave off depression. For all their power and wealth, I didn't hear of one actually having a happy life and many died young or were murdered.
The parkland was lovely to walk around and we enjoyed strolling the shaded avenues as we visited on a pretty hot day. Areas such as the Palm House (pictured) and its companion Desert House require additional payment to enter, but their architecture - the most impressive aspect for us - can be admired for free from outside! I also liked the brightly coloured floral displays immediately in front of the Palace. Their swirls and serpentine borders reflected the gilded ornamented ceilings we had seen in almost every room of our house tour.
Numerous sculptures are dotted throughout the park. Several are anonymous, but we learned that the Roman-style folly entitled The Ruin Of Carthage was designed by Johann Ferdinand Hetzendorf von Hohenberg and built in 1778. It features the river gods of the Danube and the Enns as sculpted by Wilhelm Beyer. There is absolutely nothing authentically Roman about the work. Even its ruined appearance is the result of Hetzendorf's design although recent renovation means it doesn't look quite as ruined now as it did a decade ago! Apparently the Habsburgs saw themselves as the natural successors to the earlier Roman conquerors so having The Ruin Of Carthage built in their garden was essentially propaganda.
Also a magnificent sight within the gardens is the Neptune Fountain - another Johann Ferdinand Hetzendorf von Hohenberg and Wilhelm Beyer collaboration. Commissioned by Empress Maria Theresa, it was intended to be the crowning glory of the gardens and I would say it fulfils that purpose! Started in 1776, the Fountain was completed just before Maria Theresa died.
Our three-city epic citybreak is so busy that my blogging about it is way behind schedule! I apologise for that! You can read my Prague posts here which was the first of the trio and from where we got a train to Vienna. Our Viennese Airbnb studio apartment was excellent so I am happy to recommend it. If you need accommodation for one or two people in Vienna, book into Christof's place! It had everything we needed, was conveniently located and was pretty peaceful too. If it had been available in 1899, I am sure Mark Twain would have loved it! (I spotted this plaque on the building where he did stay in Vienna, but forgot to note down the address and now can't remember! The sojourn might have formed part of his A Tramp Abroad research (my book review here)
We started with a circuit on the Ring Tram which was a great way to learn about the historic buildings lining the Ringstrasse. The half-hour tram ride is €9 and this includes an audioguide in various languages for which headphones are provided. We got a good view of everything from the distinctive yellow tram and taking the journey helped with getting our bearings when later exploring on foot. The only downside was the Mozart-interspersed narration meant I kept humming the Marriage Of Figaro overture for the rest of the day!
We were sadly underwhelmed with the Museums Quarter although the cafe there has an amazing tiled ceiling, but did find other artwork around the city including this Rachel Whiteread sculpture outside the Jewish Museum. Having first encountered her work only three months ago at Houghton Hall I easily recognised it again in and this Viennese Library is a particularly powerful piece as every book on its shelves represents a Jewish lifestory that was cut short by the Holocaust. 65,000 Viennese Jews were murdered by the Nazis.
More sculpture was on show at the Theseus Temple in the Volkspark. This replica of an Athenian temple was originally constructed in the 1820s to house a statue of Theseus slaying the Minotaur. That work was moved to the city art museum and now the space is used to display a single large sculpture each year. For 2017 the work is Bacchante by American artist Kathleen Ryan. The polished concrete grapes did fit with the ancient Greek theme of the setting but it did look a bit lost under the high ceiling!
My high spot of visiting Vienna was seeing the magnificent Lipizzaner stallions of the Spanish Riding School. I had a book about this School in my younger pony-mad days so it was the culmination of a childhood dream to actually get there! We didn't see the full show, but it is possible to buy tickets for the Morning Training which is two hours of groups of horses being put through their paces and practising some of the high dressage for which they are famous. Photography is absolutely 'verboten' and my camera probably wouldn't have been up to the task anyway so I have found a YouTube showing the horses and their beautiful riding school. All the riders in the video are male, but women have joined their ranks since 2008 and several of the riders we saw training were female. All the horses are still male though!
There are quite a lot of different boat trip possibilities on Prague's waterways from large tour boats to slimline gondolas. We chose an hour-long small-boat-and-larger-boat combined voyage run by Prague-Venice Boat Trips. Their ticket sellers are the ones dressed in white sailor outfits hanging around the Charles Bridge. For some reason they are mostly Nigerians! The trip is priced at 340 Czech crowns per person but, as we were a party of five, some spirited haggling (not by me obviously!) got that down to 300 each.
We started out in a private little boat which took us a fairly short distance through back-lane canals to the main tour boat moored atmospherically under a dark arch of the Charles Bridge. There we were offered coffee, tea or beer from the cute bar pictured above to keep us occupied while we waited for the boat to fill up a bit more. The ticket price also includes a choice of ice cream or gingerbread - get the gingerbread, it's delicious! The view below was our starting point.
This boat tour does not go far up or down the river, instead weaving between the bridges' arches in order to give us great views of historic buildings, bridges and architecture on each side of the river. Prague city centre is a bustling, busy place and I enjoyed the slower peaceful sailing away from the tourist madness! Our audio narration was good and interesting and this part lasted about half an hour I think before we returned back under the bridge and were briefly told the historical significance of each of the arch beams above our heads - there's one each remaining from four different stages of the bridge's construction.
The boat trip ticket also included free entry to the Charles Bridge museum. This museum is only small, but gives detailed information about the building of the bridge as well as its predecessor, the Judith Bridge. The extensive model pictured below is fascinating - I do like a good model! - and it was also possible to descend an iron staircase and see the original stonework of both the Charles and Judith bridges.
There are bizarre humorous public sculptures in Prague including giant crawling babies and a rotund demon, both made in bronze, and also sobering, serious works such as the pictured ascending steps with disintegrating men which commemorates all the people lost and injured during the oppressive years of enforced communism. Created by Czech sculptor Olbram Zoubek in 2002, this is intentionally a disturbing work to view and think about. The monument is located at the bottom of Petrin Hill, not far from the funicular railway up to the castle. We were lucky to see it in daylight and after dark when its illumination makes the scene even more haunting.
Snakes and owls are frequent sculpture themes on Prague buildings. We guessed they might be the symbols of historic noble families, but I don't know whether this is true! The detailed sculpture pictured below is just along from the communism monument.
The romantic couple in this street art painting are - I think I remember correctly - under the Charles Bridge. The lifesize image is on just around the corner from its artist's studio-shop where smaller prints are available for purchase.
We visited the castle and cathedral the slightly more energetic way by walking up the hill towards them and then getting the funicular railway back down again afterwards. Having previously commented amongst ourselves how quiet other parts of Prague were, the castle site provided an explanation why. It was absolutely heaving with tourists (and litter) here! We only saw the free bits, but this did include the cathedral entrance which its half dozen or so huge stained glass windows. Their colour was even more vibrant than is shown here.
The road leading to the castle is a good place to get a panoramic view across the rooftops of Prague. Someone decided to plonk a Starbucks right where the best view should be from, so this picture was taken leaning over the wall just before that.
We've been so busy this weekend that it is only just now, on our last evening here, that I have managed to set aside an hour to blog about the first city of our tri-city trip! Prague is beautiful! It has glorious architecture everywhere and I love the pastel colours of practically every building in the centre of the city. I will be honest and say that, although I knew there are some grand buildings here, I wasn't expecting anywhere near so many. I also thought they would be mostly a uniform Soviet grey. This is absolutely not the case!
We have walked about eight miles on each of our three days here, exploring both sides of the river, climbing up to the castle - an insanely busy tourist hotspot - and taking the funicular railway back down, spotting street art and sculpture.
We have enjoyed Czech food and drink too. Mint tea here is routinely made with lots of fresh mint which is delicious and I love the local homemade lemonade which isn't particularly fizzy, but is available with various flavours including ginger, cucumber or a raspberry and mint combination which is my favourite so far. Foodwise, traditional Czech food seems to mostly be about beef goulash or hearty pork dishes, but it has been easy to find vegetarian meals. I highly recommend the mixed leaf salad at Prostor which includes sun-dried tomatoes, feta cheese and lots of walnuts. The Gnocchi with sun-dried tomatoes, courgette and mushrooms at Carmelita was also delicious.
We were impressed with how clean Prague is compared to UK towns and cities. It hasn't felt at all intimidating, even walking around late at night, and we've managed to avoid the ubiquitous stag do parties so our stay has been pretty peaceful. Our Airbnb apartment is adequate although, we discovered when we got here, it is one of dozens run as a business so it doesn't have much in the way of local atmosphere. It's quiet and conveniently located though so that's the main thing.
