Boros Géza: Statue Park - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2002)

The endless promenade of the liberation monuments

Some of the Soviet memorials were transmogrified into monuments to peace. Inscriptions in Latin and Cyrillic lettering were removed from the pedestal of the robust female figure with flying pigeons designed by István Tar and erected in i960 in Városháza (formerly Lenin) tér, Kispest, or from the plinth (itself removed to this park) of Lajos Ungvári's 1962 work, the graceful woman's figure standing in Városház (Varga Jenő) tér. Along with its Cyrillic inscription, the five-pointed star was also removed from Ferenc Laborcz's composition of geometrically arranged stylised pigeons erected in 1970 in the Liberation Memorial Park, near the road to Ferihegy Airport. Here a new inscription was carved on the column of the monument in memory of the soldiers who fell in World War II. István Martsa's 1976 memorial slab featuring the dove of peace in Pestszent- imre did not take much to transform into a war monument. All that had to be done was to chisel off the star and add the date 1939 before 1945.

Some of the monuments in question were transferred to cemeteries following a decree passed by the Budapest Municipality. The focal figure of András Kocsis's 1947 monument, which used to stand in Újpest, was a Soviet flag-bearer armed with a machine gun (a monument which the Budapest Council had renovated via upgrading it in 1986) has been relocated to the Soviet military section of the Megyeri űt Cemetery. A similar lot befell the war memorial in Vigadó tér. The red-granite work here by József Schall was taken to pieces and transferred to the Rákoskeresztúr Cemetery, were it was reassembled and set up in lot 215. The slender obelisk was combined with Tibor Vilt’s 1965 liberation memorial, brought here from its original location in Pesterzsébet, to mark the mass grave of the Soviet soldiers exhumed on the territory of Budapest and reburied here. Suggestive of how unpopular Soviet symbols can have been is the fact that the Szabadság tér monument, the only Soviet memorial in Budapest left in its place, in line with a Russian-Hungarian agreement, had to be guarded day and night by police in 1992—93 lest threats of an "explosion" be fulfilled. After the change of political system the tradition of raising liberation memorials was replaced by the previously forbidden cult of erecting World War II memorials.

3« Soldier from the Liberating Soviet Army (Zsigmond Kisfaludi Strobl, 1947)

The first exhibit along the promenade is a Soviet flag-bearer, a side-figure of the Liberation Monument on Gellért Hill, that number-one public memorial of the communist regime. The demand for a large-scale central liberation memorial with which the Hungarian nation could pay homage to its liberators’ was first made in 1945. The selection of the location and the artist was made on instruc18