Budapest Guide
Józsefváros and Ferencváros
Kerepesi Cemetery
Opening time: Daily: April & Aug 7am–7pm, May– July 7am–8pm, Sept 7am–6pm, Oct 7am–5pm, Nov– March 7.30am–5pm
Price: Free
Address: AlongFiumei útca
Kerepesi Cemetery (Kerepesi temető) is the Père Lachaise of Budapest, where the famous, great and not-so-good are buried. Vintage hearses and mourning regalia in the Funerary Museum (Kegyeleti Múzeum; Mon– Thurs 10am–3pm, Fri 10am–1pm; free) near the main gates illuminate the Hungarian way of death and set the stage for the necropolis. In Communist times, Party members killed during the Uprising were buried in a prominent position near the entrance and government ministers in honourable proximity to Kossuth, while leaders and martyrs who "Lived for Communism and the People" were enshrined in a starkly ugly Pantheon of the Working Class Movement; some have been removed by their relatives since the demise of Communism. Party leader János Kádár – who ruled Hungary from 1956 to 1988 – rates a separate grave, still heaped with wreaths from admirers.
Further in lie the florid nineteenth-century mausoleums of Kossuth, Batthyány, Deák and Petőfi (whose family tomb is here, though his own body was never found). Don't miss the Art Nouveau funerary arcades between Batthyány's and the novelist Jókai's mausoleums, nor the nearby tomb of the diva Lujza Blaha, the "Nation's Nightingale", whose effigy is surrounded by statues of serenading figures. Other notables include the composer Erkel, the confectioner Gerbeaud and three chess grandmasters whose tombs are engraved with the chess moves that won them their titles. A more recent addition is József Antall, the first post-Communist prime minister of Hungary, honoured by an allegorical monument with horses struggling to burst free of a sheet.
Next to Kerepesi lies an overgrown Jewish cemetery (Izraelita temető; Mon– Fri & Sun 8am–2pm; free), with some beautiful Art Nouveau tombs of artists, politicians and industrialists, several designed by the brilliant architect Béla Lajta. That of Manfred Weiss, founder of the Csepel ironworks that once dominated the industrial island south of the city centre, is still maintained by Csepel's council, in gratitude and by way of apology for the fact that Weiss had to sign his factory over to the government in return for being allowed to leave Hungary with his family in 1944. The cemetery gates are on Salgótarján utca, about ten-minutes' walk from the main entrance to Kerepesi.