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

The main façace wall

the same title. The work was composed by Illyés in 1950 and was first published in the pages of Irodalmi Uj&ág (Literary News) on 2 November 1956. The poem was banned under the Kádár era and could not be published again before a posthumous volume of lllyés’s poetry appeared in 1986. This poem was burnt with a welding torch into the iron plates of the main gate. Forming a huge and rigid relief, these two hundred lines serve as the motto of the Statue Park.

"The poem is a lesson in self-respect and history. It makes no accusations but gives a warning and does that without cursing or spiting. This poem is a numbed murmur emitting the sense of utter helplessness. It was the same helplessness that I meant to express with the park; in the silence squatting among the stone and bronze giants arranged in ever intensifying spatial sequences, the same idea pulses that leaps on you from the poem-. 'My Lord, what is happening to us?'" (Ákos Éledd Jr.)

Illyés's work is not a revolutionary poem, nor is it merely about the 1950s. As fellow poet György Petri comments-. "No darker or more stunning picture could be drawn of the total futility of human existence". The poem does more than give a shockingly exact description of its own age - it is fraught with universal significance as it captures the timeless essence of totalitarianism. "Tyranny is about nothing else than power, which means that it is about itself," says Petri. "It closes in upon itself," as does the endless system of promenades in the Statue Park. "It is its own legitimation, it has no goal, no mission beyond itself, it fulfils nothing," very much like the ideas that these monuments were once inspired by.

The main facade wall is broken through on either side by a semi-circular niche, each occupied by a founding father of the communist ideology. Having seen more glorious days, statues of Marx, Engels and Lenin now stand guard here and welcome the visitor to the park. The crushing proportions of the fapade are best illustrated by the fact that these four-metre tall colossi look no more than 'gracious little niche statues' by comparison.

I. Statue of Marx and Engels (György Segesdi, 1971)

This double composition featuring the founding fathers of scientific socialism originally stood in Jászai Mari tér by the central headquarters of the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party (nicknamed White House). In his speech held at the unveiling ceremony, Miklós Óvári, secretary of the Central Committee of the Party, pointed out that "with its steady, hard and clear outlines the statue is meant to give expression to the revolutionary spirit of Marxism, a theory firmly focused

12