Budapest Guide
The city limits
Memento Park (Statue Park)
Opening time: Daily 10am– dusk
Price: 1500Ft
Address: Beside Balatoni út in the XXII District, 15km southwest of the city centre
Website: www.mementopark.hu
The Memento Park or Statue Park (Szoborpark) brings together 42 of the monuments that glorified Communism in Budapest, to celebrate its demise. Built in stages (1994–2004) as an "unfinished project" by architect Ákos Eleőd, the complex is an anti-temple to a bankrupt ideology. Visitors are greeted by a replica of the Stalin grandstand, from which Party leaders reviewed parades; the giant boots recall the 8m-high Stalin statue toppled in 1956. Beyond lies Witness Square, representing all those squares in Eastern Europe where people defied Communism; it's flanked by buildings with Socialist Realist facades. Of these, the Barrack Hall is used to screen Life of an Agent, a montage of ÁVO training films on how to bug or search premises and recruit informers. Across the way, the Red Star Store sells Lenin and Stalin candles, model Trabant cars and selections of revolutionary songs, which can be heard playing from a 1950s' radio set.
The park proper lies behind a bogus Classical facade framing giant statues of Lenin, Marx and Engels. Lenin's once stood beside the Városliget, while Marx's and Engels' are carved from granite quarried at Mauthausen, a Nazi concentration camp in Austria, later used by the Soviets. Inside the grounds, you'll encounter the Red Army soldier that guarded the foot of the Liberation Monument on Gellért-hegy, and dozens of other statues and memorials, large and small. Here are prewar Hungarian Communists like Béla Kun (secretly shot in Moscow on Stalin's orders) and Jenő Landler (afforded a place in the Kremlin Wall); Dimitrov, hero of the Comintern; and the Lenin statue from outside the Csepel ironworks. Artistically, the best works are the Republic of Councils Monument – a giant charging sailor based on a 1919 revolutionary poster – and Imre Varga's Béla Kun Memorial, with Kun on a tribune surrounded by a surging crowd of workers and soldiers (plus a bystander with an umbrella).
The Memento Park bus leaves from in front of Le Meridien hotel by Deák tér at 11am daily throughout the year, with an additional service at 3pm in July and August (3950Ft including entry to the park – tickets from the Volánbusz office across the road from the Meridien).