Viktor Orbán and the rebuilding of Budapest
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For most of my lifetime, if you visited Budapest’s castle district on the Buda hills overlooking the Danube, you would encounter fragments of bombed-out buildings; the solid, rusticated walls of palaces and government buildings heavily pockmarked by shrapnel and shells. The city had been almost obliterated in the second world war, with the strategic high ground of the Buda hills among the worst hit areas. The decision to leave some of the ruins was not neglect but a deliberate attempt by the socialist regime to expose the evidence of the trauma.
But now those gaps are being filled in one of Europe’s largest projects of historical reconstruction. Brand new baroque buildings are appearing where, for generations, there was nothing. Rococo details and white plasterwork are being slathered on top of reinforced concrete like cake icing. To walk around the castle district today is a jarring, slightly unnerving experience for anyone already familiar with the city. The new/old buildings appear anachronistic, so shiny, their freshly folded zinc roofs gleaming in the sun. It is the city as simulation, as movie set.
The most radical transformation has been the rebuilding of the old defence headquarters, badly damaged during the siege of Buda in 1945. For decades this was left as a soot-and-gunpowder-stained Piranesian monument to a dark past. Now it is being rebuilt as a pristine recreation of the 1896 original, dome and all. Very prominent too is the newly jazzed-up finance ministry building, a neo-gothic fantasy beside the similarly ornate Matthias Church, which has now been given back its original decorations and roof after an austere postwar rebuild. The Royal Palace’s Riding Hall has been rebuilt, as has the ornate interior of St Stephen’s Hall. The Archduke’s palace (which will officially to be known as Archduke Joseph’s palace), currently closed for refurbishment, is next. The buildings have been reconstructed using photographic evidence and surviving architects’ drawings.
Of course there is nothing unique about this. The centre of Warsaw was rebuilt after the war in a gesture of defiance, and even the German cities which long eschewed historical architecture have more recently been rebuilding their lost monuments. The old Palace of the Republic in Berlin, a genuinely popular place in pure 1970s socialist style, was destroyed to make way for a clunking replica of a very different palace that previously occupied the site. It was, I think, a terrible decision that stripped an entire layer of history away and privileged nostalgia over reality.
Thinking about Budapest’s sudden transformation, I visited Frankfurt, which has also recently rebuilt a big part of its historic centre. It too looks unreal, in the way that all reconstructions do, but also in the way that medieval German architecture does, in being impossibly picturesque. The kitsch is saved from becoming overwhelming by the immediate postwar buildings that managed to combine historical scale and material with modern expression, many with striking mosaics and carvings, unafraid of their modernity but aware of their context.
Something similar happened in Buda after the war. Many of the smaller destroyed buildings were sensitively rebuilt, modern but well-mannered, while the bigger buildings were restored. This was in part because there was a dearth of craftsmen to reconstruct these buildings, but also because it was accepted that we were in different times. Contextual modernism was the contemporary response.
For the current, self-proclaimedly “illiberal-democratic” government of Viktor Orbán, this is clearly no longer good enough. He has moved his own offices into a former Carmelite monastery in Castle Hill, and other ministries are being transferred. It’s a move that has drawn accusations of kinglike behaviour from Europe’s longest-serving prime minister, of an attempt to embed his government in the old home of Hungarian monarchy. But it has been criticised, too, for being deeply impractical. This is the heart of tourist Budapest. And Budapest is a city which has become almost unrecognisably touristy since the advent of budget air travel. It is an area of steep hills and no subways in which traffic is severely restricted. How it will accommodate thousands of civil servants remains to be seen.
At the heart of the issue, though, is the symbolism, which is, surely, the point of the rebuilding. Just as Orbán proclaims an intent to preserve “Christian values”, so a big part of the project is the return to a nostalgic version of Buda: a city at the peak of its imperial pomp, when the nation was three times the size it is now.
My instinct is to distrust this kind of reconstruction, the fantasy of the perfection of a single moment in time. How do you choose that moment? Isn’t there a hypocrisy in recreating historic structures using only a layer of faux-history applied over contemporary construction techniques?
The government’s defence of the rebuilding (known as the National Hauszmann Programme, after the architect of the Royal Palace) is that this is the city’s natural place of government, from where it was ripped away by its postwar communist leaders. This vision strips away evidence of everything in between, the layer of over four decades of socialism and direction from Moscow. It is partial and fantastical but does it really matter?
The government has been secretive about the programme’s cost and it has been carried out with minimal public consultation. Even Unesco has raised concerns about the blurring between new and old. Tourists like the past. But in Frankfurt they are just as happy to photograph the new as the old (many now don’t know the difference; even I sometimes struggled to tell) and in Budapest this is increasingly the case as well.
Next in the Hauszmann Programme is the palace itself, the one-time home of the Emperor King, Franz Josef, Kaiserlich and Königlich, Imperial and Royal. Built on the remains of a medieval palace started by Matthias Corvinus, it was extensively remodelled by Alajos Hauszmann at the end of the 19th century. Almost destroyed in the second world war, it was rebuilt in an epic and slow undertaking which lasted into the 1980s but in a restrained, workmanlike manner, stripped of some of its finery and adapted to embrace the new national library and national gallery. Its interiors are an odd, engaging cocktail of baroque and late socialist realist, enjoyably contrasting but well done. Next, it too will be “restored” to its 19th-century state — a state into which this building had evolved over eight centuries, and which only lasted for perhaps four decades.
Nevertheless, Orbán is turning the clock back and Buda is changing again. This is what the architecture of populism looks like. And probably, whether I find it unsettling or not, it will be popular.
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