Budapest [antikvár]

Budapest was established in 1873 by the merger of three towns: Pest, Buda and Óbuda. In the year of the unification, Buda was a sleepy town of soldiers and clerks on Castle Hill with hardly any buildings larger than one story. The empty and unfriendly Palace was deserted: no royal guests frequented its halls. Pest was larger and busier but, aside from the downtown part, it lay on the left bank in a disorganized and village-like manner Most of its streets were uncobbl-ed, narrow and smelly, and the City Park was infested with mosquitoes. Óbuda was nothing more than a large village. Most of its peasant citizens lived off their land and animals, produced vegetables and fruits, or were goods transporters or innkeepers. The new dwellers of the capital, these Óbuda citizens conducting a peasant way of life, spoke German, as the melodious street names indicate: Drei Herzen Gasse (Three Hearts Street), Eichkatzl Gasse (Squirrel Street) or Kleine Venedig Gasse (Little Venice Street). In summers, their coaches clattered down the narrow streets, packed high with baskets full of vegetables; they started towards the markets of Pest in the dead of night. In the autumns, the neighboring vineyards were noisy with rattles to frighten off birds, and at dawn the village shepherd collected the cows on Floriani Platz, or Flórián Square, just to drive them out through Horde Gasse, or Herdsman's Street, to the pastures of Csúcs and Üröm hills, where the sweeps of the water wells reached the sky. The Danube embankments of the newly united town were unsettled, ugly and putrid; most of the waste was earned to the washed-away embankment sides by the coaches. Citizens drank unfiltered Danube water; there was no waterworks, no sewage system. And yet, within a generation, by the turn of the century, a modern metropolis would bustle at the bank of the Danube. Budapest is the natural geographical center of the Carpathian Basin, the one-time Hungarian Kingdom. The Danube River, mnning south, divides the city into Buda and Pest. Two towns, right and left banks. Two landscapes with a different character. Hills and plains. On the Buda side, the rocks of Gellért Hill almost fall into the river; Castle Hill juts out in a somewhat northerly direction. On the other side of the river, on the left bank, stretches the Hungarian Great Plain, the westernmost stretch of the on the Pest side extending out to the horizon fits in this endlessly wide space. The Danube has indisputably played a prime role in the establishment and development of Budapest. The big river often functioned as a border dividing two worlds. It used to be the limes of the Roman Empire; the eastern edge of the Prankish state of Charles the Great stretched up to its banks; and as long as no ice covered the river, the Tartar armies of Batu Klian could come only this far west. Still, it was more frequently a connecting line than a dividing line. For, since ancient times, this huge waterway winding from the foot of the Alps to the Black Sea carried, from south and west, merchants with an enterprising spirit and cultures and setders seeking a new homeland. The land of our capital hides the archeological relics of almost every nation and culture that ever visited the Danube basin. The first city-like settlement in the territory of today's Budapest was established by the Celtic Era-vises. They buik up their reinforced settlement on the southern slope of Gellért Hill by the middle of the first century B.C. We know their coins and nicely decorated, painted red-striped ceramics. They were good merchants and excellent craftsmen. The heyday of their settlement did not last long, because at the beginning of the first century A.D., Rome—in keeping with the will of Augustus—conquered today's Transdanubia, stretching the empire's limits "up to the banks of the Danuvius River." If Pannónia, then Aquincum. If Aquincum, then Mediterranean sunshine, soft wind, luxury and comfort. House walls sparkling in white, plenty of grapes and blue sky. A false picture, 1 know, but still, it emerges in me when 1 say the name of "Small Rome," the seat of the province of Lower Pannónia. This is not a Mediterranean landscape, the landscape of today's Óbuda; I still cannot imagine that the red roof tiles of the Mithras Church are covered by snow. As if the weather deteriorated only later, along with the Roman city's walls. However, there was snow even then, and chilly winters. Under the mosaics of the Hercules villa, adorned witíi vintage scenes, lay the channels of floor heating providing warmth, just as in any other villa. Budapest is the only major city north of the Mediterranean to have preserved such a huge, contiguous complex of Roman niins in its heart. The I huge Eastern European steppe. The sea of houses heart and soul of the town was the legionnaires'