Retro Budapest 1956 and God’s Day Off

Breaking off from going to where folks play and pray on holy days, I’m stepping back to Retro Budapest 1956 and God’s Day Off.

The Hungarian capital is a very different city to the one that existed in the late 50s.

A mere 11 years after the Russian communists ‘saved’ the Hungarians from the Nazi yolk.

Only for the long-suffering Magyars it was out of the frying pan into the fire.

We are standing in Parliament Square looking down steps to a photograph of the 1956 insurrectionists sat on a tank.

The museum is closed for the season and will not reopen again until next month but we will see that tank again.

Step back to Communist time

Noami and Flora, named for a Hungarian soap character, are walking us through modern Hungarian history.

On a Get Your Guide Communist History Tour with a House of Terror option (HUF 1,987pp/£45) which we will do the latter separately.

Hungary’s tale we learn is like many in central and eastern Europe.

From Berlin to KarlMarxstadt/Chemnitz to Dresden to Prague to here there are many histories.

Noami educates us in this country which is affording us such hospitality these four days.

On our loveholidays and InterContinental Hotel trip (£1,099) which is two-fifths the size it was before the end of World War I.

And that with the territory lost to other countries Historic Hungary was larger than Italy.

Keeping the faith

The bells ring around us from the grandiose St Stephen’s Basilica to remind us that it is Sunday.

And that the citizens of this largely Catholic capital are taking their pews and filling the church.

Their parents and grandparents were not afforded such freedoms.

Or at least not without a harm their status in society and job prospects.

Or worse and particularly for those who led them in worship.

Those priests who refused to bend the knee to the Communist party.

Martyrs to the cause

And found themselves tortured and imprisoned at Andrassy ut 60, the House of Terror.

Where the fascist Arrow Cross Party did the Nazis’ dirty work and the AVH enforced communist rule.

And where we spend two hours moving through the rooms, exhibitions, audios of personal stories and dungeons and a noose.

It is harrowing but rewarding time spent and bookends a day.

Learning first hand from Noami and Flora about their generation’s journey.

Retro lifestyle

And that of their ancestors at the Retro Museum.

We learn what everyday life was like for those who lived during the communist years between 1945 and 1991.

It is an interactive and fun ride through nearly 50 years of Hungarian life.

Where you can ride a police Brabant, read a state television bulletin and dress like a Hungarian.

As well as peaking into the kitchens and lounges of regular people’s lives.

Noami and Flora may take eager tourists back in time on their tour but they live in real time in 2025 and have homes to go to.

We though track back to Freedom Square and stand along two previous American presidents celebrated in these parts.

Here’s to the heroes

Ronald Reagan, who helped bring down the Iron Curtain and George HW Bush, who came here and spoke in front of the Red Star statue.

And follow the line to read the stories and pause at the pictures of the Jews taken from Hungary to the Holocaust.

And we look up to the boarded windows of the US Embassy where Cardinal Jozsef Mindszenty took asylum.

He will be canonised by Rome in the coming years.

It has been an afternoon of time hopping for this traveller.

Of Retro Budapest 1956 and God’s Day Off.