Past Imperial Glories Still Live in Budapest

It was a typical Budapest Saturday, an autumn wind flowing down the surface of the Danube and whistling in the elegant lattices of the grand suspension bridges that feature on the front of every Hungarian travel brochure.

The morning had been spent soaking away any residual workaday stresses under the dome of the 16th-century Ottoman baths that perch over hot springs at the foot of Gellert Hill. Lunch was nouvelle Spanish-Italian cuisine at an establishment owned by a hospitable Uruguayan man and his Milanese wife.

Dessert would follow in its leisurely, calorie-intensive Central European guise at a fin de sicle cafe now simultaneously favored by tourists, artists, and the opera set.

After a long walk among Gothic cathedrals, heavy Imperial mansions, modern glass hotels, and Chinese-owned boutiques we'd start debating where to eat dinner.

The tourist's lot is indeed a difficult one in Budapest.

This is one of the great European capitals in the mold of Paris and Vienna, crafted as symbolic centers of empire in the excessively grand 19th century. Budapest's tenure as an imperial hub was a limited one. It became a sister capital of the reorganized Hapsburg Empire in 1867, administering the vast Hungarian crown lands, which included much of present-day Slovakia, Croatia, and Romania.

But the Empire lasted only 50 years, collapsing with much human suffering at the end of World War I. When the victorious Allies left the Paris Peace Conference, Hungary was left with only a third of its crown lands.

But that brief period of quasi-independence left an indelible mark on Budapest, defining much of the city we see today. The Hungarians set out to erect a capital to rival any on the Continent, bringing in foreign architects and enormous building crews. It is divided into two areas: hilly, residential Buda and industrial Pest.

Continent's first subway

Neighborhoods were razed to make way for the ring roads, radial boulevards, and triumphant squares we see today. Sewers, tram lines, bridges, parks, cafes, the Continent's first subway, and the massive neo-Gothic Parliament building were all built during these heady times. Despite two world wars, a Soviet invasion, and decades of neglect under communism, the central city retains the grandeur and dignity of a centrally planned 19th-century metropolis.

It is an imperial city that outlived its empire - an international metropolis to which gravitate people of all sorts. There are Western businessmen, Ukrainian mobsters, Romanian peasants from the backwaters of Transylvania, and sensitive young artists who fled the madness in their native Serbia. There's a sizable Chinese community, and the remains of a once vital Jewish community that was nearly extinguished in the 1944 Nazi deportations.

Resurgent Hungarian aristocrats and communists, struggling factory workers, twentysomethings from the US and Canada and their Hungarian counterparts are all mixing in the still manageable streets of this not-so-large city. It's where Old World grace coexists with newly built suburban shopping malls.

Take time to visit Castle Hill (Vr), the walled medieval district perched on Buda's main riverfront ridge. The peaceful cobblestone streets wind between restored medieval burghers' houses with some amazing views of the city below. But don't get trapped here. This neighborhood is something of a tourist ghetto, with artificial "folk art" boutiques and overpriced restaurants.

The same applies to Vci Street, the shopping zone for pedestrians of downtown Pest. Here's where to find the same brand-name boutiques you have at home and maybe get hustled by scam artists outside the store (See travel tips, left). It's chock-a-block with tourists and Russian-speaking "businessmen" showing off cell phones and bodyguards. The real, living city pulses around these tourist zones, slowing as you climb the Buda Hills behind the Castle district until you are in woodland parks high above the city.

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