Ságvári Ágnes (szerk.): Budapest. The History of a Capital (Budapest, 1975)
Foreword
Foreword Books about Budapest would fill a library. Many well-known travellers have given accounts of the Hungarian capital and its predecessors, the three towns close together on the Danube, Buda, Pest,and Óbuda, which were administratively united to form Budapest ahundredyears ago. In the 1660s Evlia Chelebi, the Turkish traveller, described the topography of these three towns, and two hundred years later the Dane Andersen also referred to them. The information collected in 1870 by József Körösi, the founder of Hungarian municipal statistics, is still an important source of information on European conditions at the middle of the nineteenth century. Archaeological investigations have been carried out by some of our best specialists in the subject, and studies on the architecture and art of our city have won international esteem. We, the citizens of Budapest think ourselves justified in our pride in our history. In the course of history inhabitants of Pest, Buda, and Óbuda were forced to rebuild their towns more than once. The worst period in our national existence is perhaps most aptly symbolized by the fate of Budapest in December 1944, when Nazi vandalism prevented Budapest from being declared an open city. As a result of their rejection of the call by the liberating Soviet Army to lay down their arms, Budapest became a theatre of war, great parts of the city were destroyed, and the future not only of the capital but, due to its economic and political importance, of the entire country was threatened with disaster. And equally symbolic was the spring of 1945, called the “Budapest Spring” by Ferenc Karinthy, one of our writers, bringing a fresh wind of creative activity in work and life to the liberated city. Budapest became the originator, prime mover, and emblem of the national and social renaissance. We believe that some knowledge of the history of this city will make our traditions, customs and the whole system of municipal administration more intelligible to foreign readers and visitors. It is perfectly fair to claim that whoever wants to understand Hungary must begin with Budapest. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, during the somewhat belated bourgeois development of Hungary accompanied by industrialization and the widespread growth of towns and urban life, the city—due to its geographical situation—became the focus of progress and centre of the contradictions that sprang from it. In 1910, when three million, i.e. 18 per cent of the population of Hungary lived in the towns, one-third of these three million lived in Budapest, a city dynamically developing on a European scale, expanding to seven times its size in the space of seventy years. After the First World War, as a result of the Versailles (Trianon) Peace Treaties, only 40 per cent of the old population of Hun-7
