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

The endless promenade dedicated to the ideas and events of the labour movement

■ Monument of the Martyn oh the Counter-Revolution by Viktor Kalló, i960

here," commented Nóra Aradi. "Equally rare is a work capable of compressing the idea of a mortally wounded and yet victorious worker whose very fall is monumental as seen from the vantage point of a consolidated power."

"Those commissioning the statue were satisfied with what they got," recalled the sculptor. "This is not a regular composition counteracting the effect of perspective distortion. It was not possible to raise it on a high pedestal and yet it had to be distanced from the viewer because seen from up close it would have been stupidly distorted. The reason it was placed upon such a huge, flat pedestal is that people surrounded by the enemy inside the building were on an island like this. When we were making the model, those people wanted a ten-metre tall sculpture. 1 had a hard time persuading them that they were wrong. I designed a 2.6-metre tall statue to be erected among the three poplars where the massacre had taken place. The pain was very much alive in the bosses of my employers at the time, so they wanted something really-really big. Finally 1 managed to reduce it to five metres. But even so, its size demanded another site. We turned it around to make it face the party headquarters. Guess what happened! Along came these film people from America, who asked: is this a monument of the other side? [...] Yet what effect would the back of a

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