Buda in the Morning

It was dreary rain when I woke up early in the morning and looked out our window onto Szentháromság tér (Holy Trinity Square). I took video of a woman, then a young man, crossing the large open square, huddled from the cold wet.

Shari was still asleep, then slowly getting up as I showered and dressed in the clothes we had packed for Iceland. I was eager to get outside and explore. She would wait until the breakfast buffet at seven.

Back in the Middle Ages, someone got the idea that devotion towards the Trinity would ward off the plague. Cities would erect columns honoring God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Buda suffered the plague in 1691-1709, erected such a column, but the plague returned. The city replaced the column with a larger one and never suffered the plague thereafter. That column still stands in the large, elegantly paved open area bounded by our Burg Hotel, the building that housed the Technical University whose students began the 1956 uprising, Mátyás Templom (Mathias Church), and Halászbástya (Fisherman's Bastion).

The neo-Gothic (i.e., 19th Century) Bastion, named after the guild charged with manning this section of the medieval walls, has a gorgeous view over the Danube River to Pest. The church and its colored tiled roof, the bastion, the equestrian statue of Hungary's first king, Saint Stephen, and the views of the bridges over the Danube and the neo-Gothic Parliament building on the Pest side of the river bank are the familiar, often photographed images of the city many regard as among the most beautiful.

That area was where I scurried around with my video camera taking every possible shot of scenes familiar to me since childhood. Every household in the large Hungarian community of Sydney had coffee table books with these images.

The drizzle was grey but light. I shared the open space with occasional pedestrians and commuters and one other couple of tourists taking still photos with an SLR camera of the Bastion area in front of the Hilton.

The only previous time I had been on Castle Hill was in 1979. My father and Uncle Zoltán took me there long enough to show me the Bastion and the house on No. 3 Dísz tér where my mother, two oldest siblings, and Zoltán took refuge in the cellar for two months during the Soviet siege of Budapest in winter of 1944-5.

I remember Uncle Zoltán angrily complaining about the existence of the Hilton Hotel adjacent to the Bastion, a modern structure built over the remaining ruins of the medieval walls of Buda. The then communist government gave Hilton permission to build. The city got some minor accommodation in design to incorporate some of the old wall. Hilton got the iconic views of Budapest.

I doubt if the city would ever again grant permission for such a commercial structure over its history. Taking my video and photos, I made a point to keep the Hilton out of the shots.

I noticed that the church and the upper level of the bastion were closed until nine o'clock. By the Jesuit Stairs that lead down from Castle Hill, there was row of modern windows that opened at nine to sell tickets. I made a note of the ticket prices and decided to return with Shari after our breakfast.

I won't go into the details of the breakfast buffet. It was quite hearty, my favorite being the thin slices of hard Hungarian (of course) sausage. Spiced with lots of sweet paprika (of course), it's not unlike a Spanish chorizo (don't even think of the Mexican).

I'll go straight to Shari and me going outside our Burg Hotel onto Szentháromság tér a little after nine. The weather hadn't changed. It was still light grey, cold, and a hint of drizzle. But my oh my . . . The large square was flooded with bus loads full of tourists equipped with umbrellas, raincoats and selfie-sticks, their tour guides lined up at the windows buying group tickets. It seems that Budapest is a popular tourist destination, even in the cold drizzle somewhat off-season.

I was glad we had chosen the Burg Hotel as the base for our three nights. We had mornings and evenings pretty much to ourselves, free to walk and explore the narrow baroque streets of the Castle Hill district.