This Hungarian city has historically played second fiddle to Vienna, but Budapest has survived the misbegotten adventure of empire, and several wars, in better shape.
There is a rough old hitchhikers’ rule of hitchhikers’ thumb that if you want to get a really authentic feel for a country, go to the second city. I call it the Avis equation: they try harder. Second cities are always a bit chippy. Quick to take offence, bigger show-offs, faster to adopt new things, exploit the moment. Think Glasgow and Edinburgh, Milan and Rome, Siena and Florence, Bombay and New Delhi, Melbourne and Sydney, San Francisco and Los Angeles, Rio and São Paulo. It doesn’t work everywhere. Birmingham is not the funky boutique alternative to London. There is no French city that comes close to Paris as a destination.
I just got back from a metropolis that has the biggest and most engaging case of Avis-itis in the world, Budapest. It started off as two cities separated by one-upmanship and the Danube. Buda is quiet, residential and ornamental. Pest is paprika, musical and monumental. You’re probably trying to think what Hungary’s first city is if Budapest is the second. Well, stop. Budapest is the only city in Hungary. There is another one called Szeged down on the Serbian border, but by all accounts it’s not worth the bus fare. Budapest was the second city not of a country but of an empire. The Habsburg Empire. They called it the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but that was a bit like Pooh and Piglet. The Hungarians got a severe dose of sibling rivalry. Of all the people in the world, the ones you really don’t want to be patronised by in a confined space are the Austrians. The Austrians themselves suffered from being thought of as second-rate Germans and third-rate Italians.
Budapest did the thing that insecure siblings do to draw attention to themselves. They built bigger and bolder, dressed up brighter and fancier and played longer and louder. The first thing you notice about Budapest is the parliament. It is vast, and built in the Neo-Gothic style. The architect went to London to look at the Houses of Parliament for inspiration, and then thought, yes, they’re a start. We can do all of that, and add a dome. If this is the mother of parliaments, then we’ll build the daddy. It is particularly impressive considering Hungary hadn’t governed itself for 400 years. Chucking up a great Gothic pile like this is an act of stirring optimism or ridiculous play-acting. The city boasts some of the most attractive Baroque and Neo-Classical streets dotted with Art Nouveau exhibitionism.
And now that all the bombast and bluster and vanity and hubris of empire is gone, and Austria and Hungary have both been shorn and stripped by two hot wars and a cold one, they have both emerged straightened and convoluted, obtuse leftover nations that seem to have come through a long course of therapy. Austria is now non-aligned but seems more neutered than neutral. It’s Hungary that has come through the misbegotten adventure of empire in better shape. Smaller and poorer, but there’s a classy feel of hip cynicism and sophisticated expectation here. Vienna lives on nostalgia, politeness and mad dreams, but Budapest has that second-city ability to adapt, to exploit the new. It wears the past, which is almost all bloody bad, with an elegant, rueful grace. Vienna wears it like a shroud.
I wasn’t expecting much from Budapest. Most people I asked said it was grey, cold, miserable and to eat before I went. Admittedly most of the people I asked were Viennese. I was lucky with the weather. It was bright and chilly, perfect for walking city streets. The cafés offer blankets so that you can sit outside till the last possible moment. I found excellent food. There is a beautiful central market inspired by Eiffel’s engineers, a warehouse of glass and girders. Inside there is a nostril-humping collation of pickles, preserves, paprika and pastries. Hungary is a long way from any coast, and it’s mostly a blasted steppe, so it’s free from fish or green vegetables, which is such a relief. You can concentrate on the veal stew, the sour cream, the dumplings, the plums and cinnamon.
The city has a deep, abiding rhythm. Gypsy violinists lurk wherever two tables are gathered. The ancient syncopated extortionists of Middle Europe, they stalk the alleys of restaurants and cafés with the insouciant mission of mafia hit-men. I watched one large, gold-incisored grinning fiddler intimidate a Japanese tourist with lightning bow work flicked past the poor man’s head like a samurai sword. His victim reached into his pocket and handed over his wallet. The violinist picked out three or four of the juiciest notes and bowed before shimmering off like a hungry shark, trailing Mendelssohn behind him.
I went to an afternoon concert in an Art Nouveau hall where Liszt had once played. The audience was immensely knowledgeable. There is a distinct pleasure in sharing music with people who know a lot more about it than you do. The orchestra knows it, they try harder and the conductor appreciates the applause more. And in the interval, they all trooped out and ate proper tiny opera sandwiches of smoked pig and hard cheese with gherkins and cocktail onions. I noticed that Joe Cocker was playing next month.
I’m haunted by Budapest now, its beauty, its sense of itself. Its café life, the music and the light on the Danube. In between Vienna and Budapest is Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia. It was closed. That’s not a joke. Really, it was closed. I was there for two days, and everything I wanted to see, from the Jewish Museum to the Hall of Mirrors where the treaty after the Battle of Austerlitz was signed, to the UFO Restaurant, a hideous communist manifestation that hovers over the ugliest bridge in the world, everything was closed. It was caught in that malaise of disconnected inertia that’s so often the legacy of communist countries. Places that sit and wait for someone to bulldoze them or give them a doughnut.
Bratislava has not got many tourists, but it does get the odd English stag party. My guide said that Slovakians tried to ignore them. ‘The English are the worst. There was a bad incident. An Englishman masturbated into the fountain in the main square, in front of everybody.’ Really? How awful. But I sort of know where he was coming from. You have to make your own entertainment in Bratislava, and hats off for managing to raise that much excitement.