The city limits - The Rough Guide to Budapest - page 182

back and forth every twenty minutes only run between 9am and 3pm Tuesday to Friday. Near
the graves, an ornate wooden gateway and headposts mark a mass grave now designated as a
National Pantheon - as opposed to the Communist pantheon in Kerepesi .
The Jewishcemetery , 700m up the road from the New Public Cemetery, is the burial place
of Ernő Szép (author of The Smell of Humans , a searing Holocaust memoir), as well as
many rabbis and industrialists. Beside the wall on Kozma utca stand the grand crypts of the
Goldberger and Kornfeld manufacturing dynasties, and the dazzling blue-and-gold-tiled Art
Nouveau tomb of shopkeeper Sándor Schmidl , designed by Ödön Lechner and Béla Lajta
(who later became supervisor of Budapest's Jewish cemeteries).
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Memento Park (Statue Park)
Szoborpark • XXII, Balatoni út • Daily 10am-dusk • 1500Ft; guided tours 1200Ft • 1 424 7500, memen-
topark.hu • Memento Park bus goes from Deák tér bus stop with the Park logo by the old bus station at 11am,
returningat1pm(dailybutNov-MarchSat-Mononly)for4900Ft(includingentryandaguidedtour;ticketsare
purchased on the bus); alternatively, take metro line #4 to Kelenfold station, and then a Volán bus (not covered
by BKV passes) towards Diósd-Érd • See map
Fifteen kilometres southwest of the city centre, but easily the most popular site on the city's
outskirts, the Memento Park (sometimes still known as the Statue Park) brings together 42
of the monuments that glorified Communism in Budapest, to celebrate its demise. Built in
stages (1994-2004) as an “unfinished project” by architect Ákos Eleőd, the complex is an
anti-temple to a bankrupt ideology. Visitors are greeted by a replica of the Stalin grand-
stand , from which Party leaders reviewed parades; the giant boots recall the 8m-high Stalin
statue toppled in 1956. Beyond lies Witness Square, representing all those squares in Eastern
Europe where people defied Communism; it's flanked by buildings with Socialist Realist
facades. Of these, the Barrack Hall is used to screen Life of an Agent , a montage of ÁVO
training films on how to bug or search premises and recruit informers. Across the way, the
Red Star Store sells Lenin and Stalin candles, model Trabant cars and selections of revolu-
tionary songs, which can be heard playing from a 1950s' radio set.
The park proper lies behind a bogus Classical facade framing giant statues of Lenin , Marx
and Engels . Lenin's once stood beside the Városliget, while Marx's and Engels' are carved
from granite quarried at Mauthausen, a Nazi concentration camp in Austria, later used by the
Soviets. Inside the grounds, you'll encounter the Red Army soldier that guarded the foot of
the Liberation Monument on Gellért-hegy, and dozens of other statues and memorials, large
and small. Here are prewar Hungarian Communists such as Béla Kun (secretly shot in Mo-
scow on Stalin's orders) and Jenő Landler (afforded a place in the Kremlin Wall); Georgi
Dimitrov, hero of the Comintern; and the Lenin statue from outside the Csepel ironworks.
Artistically, the best works are the RepublicofCouncilsMonument - a giant charging sail-
or based on a 1919 revolutionary poster - and Imre Varga's Béla Kun Memorial , with Kun