Budapest: Between East and West [antikvár]

As it flowed from my own heart in a spate, wise was the Danube, turbulent and great. . . whose waves embrace past, present and future. Attila József (1905-37) Towards the end of the Congress of Vienna in the spring of 1815, Klemens von Metternich, the Austrian Foreign Minister, took a young British visitor in his carriage to the eastern edge of the city. As the pair descended the steps, the eminent Habsburg statesman pointed his finger to the road towards Hungary and declared: 'Look, that's where Europe ends . . . out there, [Hungary] is the Orient.' Half a century later William H. Seward, President Lincoln's Secretary of State, went on a journey around the world immediately after his term of office ended. In summer 1869 he arrived in Pest* from an unaccustomed direction, sailing from the Black Sea up the Danube through the Balkans. Most visitors came then, as they do now, from the west. He was surprised by what he saw. 'How striking is the contrast of European and Asiatic civilization,' he wrote later in his diary. 'Though Buda-Pesth is an inland provincial town . the tonnage in its port, altogether of steam, is greater than that of Cairo, Alexandria or Constantinople. We were not prepared for a scene of such activity . Here we feel, for the first time, that we have left the East behind, and have only Western civilization before us.'^ This is a constant theme, as alive in the twenty-first century as in the nineteenth. Throughout history Hungary and its capital have been a significant part of Western Europe yet at the same time apart from * At this point Budapest was not yet a unified city but separate towns, Buda and Pest. The first bridge joining them, as we shall see, was not opened until 1849.