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

The endless promenade of the liberation monuments

tions given by Marshal Voroshilov, the Soviet chairman of the Allied Forces Supervisory Committee in Hungary. The piece was designed and assembled under Soviet supervision, the plinth itself being the work of Soviet architects. As expenses were covered by the Hungarian government, money was no object for the Soviets. Completed by 1947, the forty-seven metre composition was topped with the allegory of liberty, a female figure raising a palm leaf above her head, with a Soviet soldier standing guard below holding a triumphal flag in its hands. On the sides of the monument were reliefs featuring scenes from the rebuilding of the country. Carved in Cyrillic script on the back of the plinth were the names of Soviet soldiers who had lost their lives during the siege of Budapest. The altar-like group was flanked by allegories in neo-Baroque academic style representing the battle of good and evil, supplemented with further side-figures.

The iconological reason for crowning Gellért Hill with the composition was that with its situation the monument gave forceful symbolic expression to the subjected position of the capital city and indeed of the whole country. The figure of the armed soldier standing guard on a plinth of its own below the central figure was meant to give embodiment to the strength of the liberating

■ Project {or the Statue o{ Freedom i Soul by Tárnái Szentjó by. 1993

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