Budapest

Landmarks

What I would eat first.

Landmarks are fruit. The bigger the sight, the bigger the bonus.

• Budavári Palota 1,500 points

  Come in through the Oroszlános udvar. Four lions on the gate, and not one of them moves aside. Then out onto the Savoyai terasz and look down: from there you can see everything you have eaten today.

• Budavári Nagyboldogasszony-templom 500 points

  The rest of the hill is pale. This roof is not: coloured tiles laid in diamonds, and from the far bank the only colour up there. I judge a building by what it puts on.

• Citadella 500 points

  The highest thing on this level. Do not go straight up, take the Citadella sétány round the back: longer, shadier, and the view arrives all at once at the end instead of in bites. Save this one for last.

• Központi Vásárcsarnok 500 points

  The one thing on this level that agrees with me about what a city is for. Fish downstairs, paprika and sausage and pickles by the crate on the main floor, lunch above. It sits at the Pest end of Szabadság híd and you smell it before you see it.

• Széchenyi lánchíd 500 points

  Walk this one instead of photographing it. A lion sits at each end, and between them the deck hums under your soles in a way no picture carries. The flattest thing I get all day, and I take my time over it.

• Erdélyi bástya 250 points

  The quiet north-west corner up top, off the line everybody follows. Come along the Tóth Árpád sétány, under the plane trees by the west wall. It is usually empty, which up here is the rarest thing on offer.

• Erzsébet híd 250 points

  The white one, and the fastest way off the Pest lanes to the foot of the hill. Stop in the middle and look upstream: both banks line up from there, and the rest of your day is laid out in front of you.

• Károlyi-palota 250 points

  Go round the back. Behind it there is a walled garden with gravel paths and benches, the quietest corner on this side of the water. Váci utca is four minutes away and nobody from it is here.

• Magyarok Nagyasszonya Sziklatemplom 250 points

  This one is not on the hillside, it is in it. At the Buda end of Szabadság híd, look for the opening in the crag; there is barely a front to find. I like a building that is mostly not there.

• Pesti Vigadó 250 points

  Stand on the Dunakorzó and look up. Every hand's width of that front is decorated and no piece of it agrees with the next. Then turn round: nowhere on this bank gives you a better look at the hill you still have to get up.

• Szabadság tér 250 points

  The biggest gap on the Pest side. Trees down the middle, tall facades all round, and a great deal of nothing in between. After a morning of narrow lanes I like a plate with room left on it.

Why here

Somebody stood here and decided.

The two banks are not the same thing. On the left, flat marsh and scrub in the arc of a river bend, with good places to cross that carried traffic long before anyone wrote it down. On the right, a ridge. For a long time the crossing was the whole business and the town sat on the left. Then a king decided the height mattered more than the walk up, moved the people onto the Castle Hill and laid out a new town on top. Both sides have counted ever since, and there is water in the middle. So this is a level you eat in two courses.

Sources: lexikon.katolikus.hu

Who ruled

Everyone who thought they owned this.

I outlasted all of them. It is the one thing I am good at.

1061–1541

The kings of Hungary. Both towns down here are royal foundations, and Pest is on paper from 1061, in a charter for a Benedictine abbey. From the middle of the 13th century the important half was the high one: Pest never won back its old standing, but it stayed a trading place, because the position was too good to leave lying about.

Sources: lexikon.katolikus.hu, lexikon.katolikus.hu

1541–1686

The Ottomans. On 21 August 1541 Pest passed for good into Turkish hands, and Buda became the seat: the pashas stayed there and dated their letters from it. Not much new went up. Churches were turned into mosques, two dervish houses and two bath houses were added, and the residential quarters fitted themselves into the medieval lanes instead of replacing them. That is the layout still running under your feet. In 1686 the whole thing changed hands again.

Sources: lexikon.katolikus.hu

1686–1873

The Habsburgs, as kings of Hungary. On the flat bank that mostly meant money: Pest got its royal free city charter in 1703, steam boats ran to Vienna from 1831, the first railway lines were built from 1846, and the population multiplied tenfold in seventy-five years, to 128,000. The crown stayed Habsburg long after this line ends. What ended in 1873 was this town being run from somewhere else.

Sources: lexikon.katolikus.hu

1873–

Itself. The 1872 act puts Buda, Pest, Óbuda and an island into one authority that settles its own internal affairs, elects its own officials, sets its own budget and deals with the government directly. The paperwork calls that self-government. I call it the first time anybody asked the place.

Sources: net.jogtar.hu

Three facts

Three things I know about this place.

1. A single paragraph made this city, and it is worth reading what it actually joined. The 1872 act unites the royal free capitals of Buda and Pest with the market town of Óbuda and Margaret Island, the last two cut out of the county. Four pieces, one of them an island. And the law writes it Buda-Pest, with a hyphen. The hyphen did not survive.

   Sources: net.jogtar.hu

2. The crossing in the city's icon was not free. Toll houses stood at both ends, everybody paid, and the part that mattered at the time is that the nobles paid too. That is what made the shareholders their money back. It was collected until 30 November 1918. For sixty-nine years, the priciest lane in town.

   Sources: mnl.gov.hu

3. Pest had street names long before the city had this one, and a handful are known only because sources from the Ottoman period wrote them down. There was a wheat market and a hay market. There was Bécsi utca, and you still walk that one. And there was Kalácssütő utca, the cake bakers' lane, which is not on your map any more. I would have taken that one slowly.

   Sources: lexikon.katolikus.hu

Counted from the streets in the level itself, not from a guidebook.

• 176streets
• 2,752dots
• 45.1km of street
• 58.2km on foot
• 16.6hours at a stroll