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

■ The itatue oh Ferenc Münnich ii toppled. iggo

works of art at the same time. (Eleőd retained, for example, the proportions of the plinths.) "While putting them in quotation marks, he carefully avoided the effect of presenting them as comic figures in a waxwork show" (art historian György Szűcs). The park is neither meant to ornament nor to disgrace. What Eleőd has created is no politically motivated, moralising memorial park, but an architecturally correct system of spaces capable of evoking recent history. The park is both about dictatorship and democracy, as it is only the latter that can face its own past with courage and dignity. As such the Statue Park is both a symbol and a unique achievement of the change of political system in Hungary.

The opening of the Statue Park took place on 27 June 1993 as an event of the Budapest 'Fairwell' Celebrations marking the second anniversary of the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Hungary. Directed by Péter Bacsó, the ceremonial opening featured Comrade Bastion himself as the great man (in fact a figure in Bacsó’s legendary film The Witnedi), dressed in period costume’, who cut the ribbon and addressed his comrades, the statues, and the general public in a welcoming speech. Following this temporary opening, the park has welcomed visitors since the autumn of 1993, even though the installation will only be fully

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