This is an absolutely bonkers experience outside of Budapest. It is visually surreal and historically dramatic. This place shows, with nary a placard, how much the world has changed in 30ish years (conveniently aligning with my own birth in 1987). The bizarreness of the place is such that he alternate title of this post was “Selfies with Soviets”. We didn’t take any selfies, but we did take a bunch of photos you can see below.

Memento Park is a park (…duh) in the suburbs of Budapest where the city deposited all of the old statues and monuments after the dissolution of the USSR. Hungary was, of course, a satellite state and part of the Soviet Union until 1991. I’ve been trying to learn as much as I can about this period in history since it the Soviet Union had a huge impact on almost all of the countries we’ve visited so far: Poland, Estonia, Germany, Russia itself, the Czech Republic, and now Hungary, but there is just so much to learn and keep track of. I knew Lenin, Stalin, fall of the Berlin wall, and some other basics, but that is (pitifully) all.

And honestly, I still don’t know much about communism in Hungary after visiting Memento Park, but I am struck at what the park represents. In 2018, this is an out-of-the-way tourist oddity, where once-fearsome symbols and leaders have transformed into curious relics for tourists to take funny photos with. These statues symbolize a state that terrorized and tortured and murdered countless people and now…now millennials can pose in front of Giant Running Communist man. Like I did. Shamelessly. 

Well, maybe not entirely shamelessly. I wondered on our way back: is it offensive to have fun with these now-comical looking bits of history? Or is it the opposite: by laughing at these absurd seeming stone edifices, are we giving this fallen government what it deserves? I wonder how victims of this regime feel about this park, about these statuary propaganda pieces? Would they strike funny poses…or is it too soon? 

I think if it were me, if I were the victim of a corrupt and violent government, I would want it toppled. I would want those statues shoved into an obscure park. I would want them laughed at. I would want people physically climbing them and laughing in their face.  I think about all of the Confederate statues in my own country, and IMHO…the Hungarians are onto something here.

Getting to the park is a whole separate adventure. There is a tourist bus that will pick you up and drop you off, but we didn’t feel like paying for that. So we took, in order: a subway, a commuter train, a bus, a bus, a subway and another subway to get to and from the park. In Budapest, unless you buy a 24 hour pass, each step requires a new ticket (you buy them in bundles of 10), so we accumulated quite the handful of tickets on this journey. 

It took about an hour each way, but was so worth it. We really like experiencing public transit in other countries (it’s like Traveler Ninja Warrior), and the trams, subways, busses and trains in Budapest could not be more lovely! A straightforward, well-marked, punctual system that is a thing of beauty. I particularly loved how colorful the subway stations were. I almost swooned over the yellow hallways transferring from the M3 to the M4. 

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