History lessons in Pest

The Art Hostel, which is where we're staying, is located on the Pest side of the river, like most of the accommodation in Budapest, so we decided to base our initial exploration on Thursday in the vicinity. First stop was the Hungarian Parliament ten minutes down the road which is a spectacular great Gothic building modelled on the Palace of Westminster but with more spires. It's set in a large square which was the site of various demonstrations during the Soviet era. There's a really striking memorial to Hungarian independence now on the site where hundreds of people were mowed down by machine gun fire. It has a symbolic grave and a Hungarian flag with a hole torn in the middle: a reminder of how Hungarians tore the Soviet emblem out of their flag during demonstrations.

From here we walked along the banks of the Danube looking over at the stunning view of Buda and at the chain bridge plunged into the main part of Pest. The streets are very handsome, clean and packed with prosperous looking shops, churches and theatres. It's very hard to believe that these streets have been almost totally rebuilt since being flattened in World War Two. The city bears very few scars of its at times horrific past. The communist era seems to have pretty much passed Budapest by in terms of architecture, in the centre at any rate. It's definitely the most beautiful city we've been to so far: like what Bucharest must have been once, and not even comparable to poor old Sofia.

We wandered around Pest for some time, finding amongst other things a very pretentious square of modern art (we thought the main exhibit was a paddling pool but it turned out to be "a meditation on the art of co-operative creativity") and a little gem of a church down a side street where all-day adoration was going on. We ended up at the synagogue, the biggest in Europe and the 2nd biggest in the world after the one in New York. It was built in the 1850s when the Jewish population in Budapest was at its peak and was finally being accepted in Hungarian society: this was when laws were passed giving Jews the same rights as Christians in terms of jobs and taxes. As a mark of co-operation, the Jewish authorities commissioned a Catholic architect to design the synagogue, with the result that it looks surprisingly like a basilica. For the first time on this trip, we opted for the guided tour, and were really glad we did, as it enabled us to see the stunning interior close up and also hear some really amazing facts about the history of the Jews in Hungary. Hungary was a relatively safe place for Jews for most of WWII, as while the Nazis puppet government in Budapest had persecuted the Jewish community heavily by aking away their jobs and property, they had at least stopped short of actually sending them to death camps. However in 1944, the government tried to negotiate a secret peace treaty with the Allies, and as a result, the Nazi army moved in. Then, with horrible efficiency, they proceeded to exterminate the Hungarian Jewish population within months, first putting them into a ghetto and then sending them to Auschwitz to die in the gas chambers, or of typhoid in the camp. From April 1944 to the end of the war, 600,000 Hungarian Jews had been killed. To give some idea of scale, that means every third person who died in Auschwitz was a Hungarian Jew, and every tenth victim of the Holocaust overall was a Hungarian Jew. Before the war, there were 800,000 Jews in Hungary, now the population is just under 100,000.

The tour took us through the graveyard, which contains a mass grave of 3000 Jews, all of whom were killed in a massacre in the ghetto in 1945, just before the end of the war. Only 24 were able to be identified later, so there are just 24 headstones, all with the same date. Around the back of the synagogue is the memorial garden with a beautiful sculpture of a weeping willow in beaten steel, paid for by donations from surviving family members. There is also a memorial to all those non-Jewish Hungarians, all of whom risked, and many of whom gave their lives to save their Jewish neighbours. The chief among these is actually a Swedish diplomat called Raoul Wallenberg who was working in Budapest at the time and saved thousands of lives by issuing fake passports and hiding Jews in properties owned by the Swedish embassy. He was later taken by the Russians after World War Two for unspecified reasons and was never seen again.

After leaving the synagogue, we walked through the former Jewish ghetto, which is now full of Jewish cultural centres and memorials, as well as ordinary houses and shops. It's a very surreal feeling to be walking through scenes of so much former suffering which within our grandparents time was surrounded with barbed wire and had signs up saying, "No Christians may enter." Somehow the suffering beneath the surface of this city is all the more poignant because the surface is so much more beautiful than somewhere like Bucharest, where the scars are far more obvious.

This post seems to be turning into a history lesson, and a rather depressing one at that, but it is such a huge part of the trip - we're immersed in a whole new story every time we step off the train. Sarah and I are both feeling increasingly embarassed by how little we know about countries which are really so close to us and are trying to soak up as much information as possible. I could go on and on about the uprising in 1956, the subsequent Terror in reprisals, the heroic Imre Nagy, the rat Janos Kadar who changed sides to join the Soviets when he saw the coup was going to fail and was later hailed as the human face of communism......don't worry I'll restrain myself. We certainly haven't finished learning since leaving Durham.

After leaving the Jewish quarter, it was on to a totally different part of history as we passed the birth place of Liszt, which is now a music academy with a very large and stern statue of him outside. Then we walked down Andrassy Utcar, the main (and very splendid) street in Pest which contains, amongst other things, lots of diamond shops, the former headquarters of the Nazi, and then Soviet, secret service, and the Opera House which is a magnificent building. We popped into here and managed to get wonderfully cheap tickets for the ballet on Friday night - they cost the equivalent of 3 pounds! More on this later.

From here it was on to St Stephen's Basilica, the biggest church in Budapest. It's a stunning building, and the inside is still very reverent, as most of it is roped off from tourists. We didn't manage to see the right arm of St Stephen, Hungary's most prized relic, as the chapel was, wait for it, undergoing renovation (a continuing theme for the trip). Perhaps another time.... The basilica overlooks a square filled with bars and coffee shops, which looked beautiful in the twilight and we walked back to the hostel through the streets which were just beginning to fill up with people going out for the evening.

Back in the hostel we cooked a slightly unsuccessful chilli with our new German friend and planned what we were going to do the next day. Susan was only able to stay two nights so wanted to be sure she saw as much as possible - this is proving very good for us as otherwise we have a slight tendency not to wake up until shamefully late. Having done quite a lot in Pest today, we decided tomorrow would be Buda.