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

The teacher brings a stuffed hare into class. "So, what is this, children? Can you tell me?" she asks. Deep silence. "Come on, now," she pleads, "what have we been talking about the whole year?" ”1 know, Miss," says little Maurice raising his hand, "it must be Comrade Lenin himself!"

The joke quoted above opens 'Lenin Garden’, an article published in the 5 July 1989 issue of the magazine Hitel, in which its author, the literary historian László Szörényi, proposed for the first time that a statue park be established for the public sculptures of the communist era. The park, as Szörényi envisaged it, was to be located in Csepel, where all the Lenin statues were to be assembled for the Expo planned for 1995.

In the euphoric mood of the period, when the change of political system unfolded, the idea fired the imagination of many a contemporary. For example, the Recsk Association of former political prisoners issued a proclamation asking Hungary’s cities, towns and villages to donate the political monuments slated for dismantling to the association so they could re-locate them at Recsk. The statues were meant to be erected against the background of a forty-metre high rock wall in the local quarry, where inmates of the Recsk forced-labour camp used to work.

"The location would be ideal for such a statue park," the chairman of the veteran organisation argued in the daily Magyar Nemzet, "because here the statues could rest in peaceful coexistence in a place where the annihilation camp stood, which gave practical meaning to the ideas that inspired these monuments." Although the proposed venue was inspected by the National Fine and Applied Arts Jury, the proposition made by the former prisoners did not meet with universal approval.

While the ideas of an Expo, a Lenin theme park and a monument-cum-pris- oners’ camp all fell through, an open air museum exhibiting political monuments removed from their various locations in Budapest was in fact established. This is the Statue Park.

With the collapse of the one-party system, the issue of what should be done with the monuments of the fallen regime became a pressing problem. Spontaneous demonstrations held by various political organisations as well as the defacement of these monuments demanded an urgent response. In January 1991, a few months after the first free municipal elections, the Cultural Committee of the Budapest Assembly put the issue of politically charged public monuments on its agenda. The Municipality of Budapest invited suggestions from the district authorities for ways of dealing with statues under their jurisdiction. In the

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