A walk as simultaneously a work of art and guided tour

Budapest, a city to be explained

MúzeumCafé 48.

It is difficult to find the appropriate approach to a relatively fresh, not thoroughly analysed topic such as the city walk. MúzeumCafé highlights a possible perspective (Budapest as a museum) and approaching the theme with museological definitions can provide a starting point. Today an exhibition about history or the arts simultaneously represents cultural and social history, as well as anthropology, and a city walk should also meet these demands in order to ‘work’. It is a question as to what demand caused the boom of city walks, since finding the potential answers may lead to improving the approach.

A series entitled Mysteries at the Museum is on Travel Channel. It shows seemingly insignificant items from hidden, mostly American museum collections. They are not artworks but articles of everyday use – a costume, a typewriter, binoculars, a bottle, a lock of hair, a weapon or a piece of furniture. The related story is not part of great history, it is not included in the curriculum or part of general knowledge. The former owner or user may have been an anonymous hero of the Wild West, a failed inventor or the actual hero of an event widely written about in the contemporary tabloids. Together with the object, the viewer gets a story, a family, a town, its inhabitants, officials, red tape, morality, financial standing, the life of social classes and strata at a certain place and time – simultaneously micro-stories, sub-culture and politics. The starting point is a single object in a small museum, which may only have a few lines of description, if that. The political, sociological and social history connected to the article unfolds with meticulous research, primarily with the attention it receives from a historian or researcher, and that may arouse the viewer’s interest. The choice is not accidental: there must be an obvious reason why the museum included a certain object in its collection, yet it becomes unique by the researched story that is made public.

There are thousands of buildings in Budapest, hardly a few per cent are listed and even fewer are shown during a sightseeing tour when tourist coaches stop or slow down, and which are included in guide books (and history books). Few of them are older than 150 years and have any signs that differentiate them from other residential blocks or public buildings. A genre was born a few years ago which selects from these buildings those that have features characteristic for a theme. They may be the locations of historical events or can be regarded as typical for a historical or sociological situation, illustrating or explaining the chosen topic. The people participating in these tours are mostly local and only rarely tourists, since the need to learn about something more thoroughly occurs when the surface is already known. A city tour is an exhibition, although in this case the curator only selects what is to be shown and cannot rearrange the installation, the surroundings. It is a guided exhibition tour; the visitor views the exhibition with a guide and on a defined route. It is an interactive museum educational event, but it presumes that the participants have some basic knowledge, some preliminary information. It is the research which is extended during and between the walks, but cannot be planned in advance. It is a performance, a lecture, group therapy or a tourist programme, depending on the theme and the aim.

City walks represent means of recalling and keeping something in memory, although in this respect events involving architectural or social history are significantly different: one interprets the visible, the other sheds light on the invisible. A walk focussing on architectural history (100-Year-Old Buildings, Bauhaus Tours) can rely on the spectacle of existing buildings. The selection requires explanation and the sight is given something extra by highlighting details. Tours involving ‘telling stories’ must find connecting points with the visible, since the passed away existence of something is often essential – how memory can maintain what no longer exists, what material sights can be chosen to illustrate the content. The essence of this micro-anthropological approach is that it is not about the city in general, but about the experience of its residents. During the walk the urban space becomes cultural with symbolic functions and meanings.

Alternative tourist routes and guided walks are conducted in other large cities (New York, Prague, London, Berlin) but they cannot be characterised by a political or social historical deep drilling that is similar to the Budapest walks. There, introducing the exotic is emphatic and not the exposure or discussion of historical traumas.

Thus the walks in the Hungarian capital may be regarded as a Budapest or Hungarian special feature – the question is what the reason may be. If the list of programmes on offer is examined, the explanation is clear: the majority of walks are about telling the stories of the past, especially the recent past (20th century), about how history has invaded private lives. Today it is possible to talk about everything (at least in this connection), but it is a question as to what form it should be given. There used to be examples, and potential answers appear today for facing up to the past and rescuing finds, just like new ways of using urban spaces. The activity of the Óvás! Association is a possible approach: the NGO has protected the cultural heritage of the Jewish Quarter in Budapest’s Elisabeth Town since 2004, or more precisely has rescued what can still be rescued in terms of buildings, objects and stories. Another project, ‘Budapest in the shadow of dictatorships’ (or Secret Budapest) guides participants through obvious as well as lesser known sights of shocking historical events. The projects of the Centre of Contemporary Architecture offer a new alternative in addition to traditional city walks, such as Unoccupied which tries to transplant successful European examples for utilising vacant properties and, as part of that, with the help of ordinary people they survey the legal and physical situation of the city’s unoccupied properties, while anyone can upload still unmarked buildings on their website’s map. The Live Monument Movement was set up as a protest against a political decision (the monument in Szabadság Square in memory of the victims of German occupation). It organises continuous flash mobs, talks and actions, with all their events held in public spaces.

Enterprises which were the first to be established had tourists in mind, so it is interesting that today’s tendency shows that in the end various age groups of Budapest’s middle class inhabitants have become the primary consumers of city walks. The qualification and research field of the entrepreneurs characterize the themes of their organised tours, the manner of conducting them and the image of the enterprise (website, activity on social networks, prices and discounts, etc.). Beyond Budapest Sightseeing can be regarded as the forerunner of the walks: it was launched by two then recently graduated social policy experts Gyuri Baglyas and his wife, Manó Domján. Having moved to Joseph Town, they began surveying their residential environment. The hidden beauty of the district was revealed and the methodology they studied at university helped them gather stories and customs from residents who had lived in the district for a long time. In the end everything and everyone was included in the itinerary of the early walks, since not only did they go from street to street, building to building, but also from apartment to apartment. In one residents baked, in another they cooked and in a third they played music for the guests. The adjective sociocultural applied to the walks was definitely appropriate. “Self-employment was the aim in the beginning,” says Gyuri Baglyas, who moved to the country and sold the business in 2012. The project soon surpassed the initial expectations and it won the recognition “Most Promising Enterprise of the Year” in its second year. Although the aim was to attract tourists, the district turned out to be exciting enough for Budapest residents. They had to develop and change continuously, if only because competitors appeared on the scene and their own business began to swell to an industrial size. They were able to remain in the competition providing a high standard, but then they withdrew from the market. “Since then I have had nothing to do with the city or the walks, but I am pleased to see what the initial bravado has developed into,” says Gyuri, who thinks that these days a new business must target the gaps in order to have a head start. Today ‘Beyond’ is the largest organiser of walks in Budapest, and although their project is diverse, Joseph Town, the “decaying grandeur”, is still a primary target for their tours.

The founder-manager of Bupap (Budapest Asphalt Project), Anna Lénárd, refers to city walks as a Hungarian crisis product: “We have many unresolved problems, there are many unexplained situations.” She began her studies at the Medical University but graduated from the University of the Arts (as a sculptor), after which she worked as a tourist guide. She gained her experience in three fields (group therapy, the arts and tourism) when she organised the first walk on Sváb Hill. The idea came from an article entitled Dark Hill by Péter György, published in Élet és Irodalom: the neighbourhood which is favoured by tourists is full of places which “are regarded with the pleasant nostalgia of politics-free local history”, while they provided the location of the darkest deeds in the history of the 20th century and their being unmarked reinforces the problem of the remembrance of the Holocaust.

When planning a walk it is not enough to discover the relevant information connected to the locations, the route must be worked out in such a way that interest can be maintained for 2-3 hours and the walkers’ needs must also be taken into consideration, for example allowing them to be able to sit down during the period. Anna Lénárd worked as a guide in Hungary and abroad for years, so she was familiar with the psychology and sociology of tourism (she mentions sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, who in his lecture Tourist and Vagabonds calls attention to the fact that tourists keep their distance and thus are constantly ready to leave if it does not engross them). So she was aware of what other services can raise attention and create a community. She regarded it important for the enterprise to be self-sufficient, even when the guiding was done by others who as researchers knew the area best. Today it is clear for everyone that walks must be paid for, although market oriented intellectual work in Hungary is rather problematic. Anyone can see the buildings and spaces, but only a few are aware of what they really see: “the city requires explanation”. Anna Lénárd has consciously developed her enterprise: to the walks focusing on the unprocessed political past she added mapping the typical locations of minorities and communities, the urban image (how a district may change with construction and demolition), cultural anthropology (the cultural history of hygiene) and the gender theme, since experience shows that twice as many women than men take part in the walks. She organises tours to well-known tourist sights, which focus on the invisible past in deeper layers, for example Buda Castle hides the remains of a Jewish Quarter which existed some 800 years ago. There have always been one-off projects, such as the Pasarét walk after the film adaptation of Magda Szabó’s novel Doors was shown, or the Hanna and Aladár tour by bus, which introduced locations from the mansions of Andrássy Avenue to the Csepel Works after the publication of I Kiss Your Hands Many Times by Marianne Szegedy-Maszák.

According to Anna Lénárd, city walks could be regarded as a criticism of tourism. She thinks that the demand for the walks expresses a need for counter-culture, since these civilian initiatives fill the gaps left by the large institutions and projects. They present activities for the middle classes, which are absent, where people with similar attitudes and requirements, who do not know each other, get together in random groups and direct communication about history, religion and the arts can commence. “A city walk is open, the most open genre”, so it can be used for many kinds of research and projects. NGOs organise social or ‘homeless’ walks, which target community consciousness and social sensitivity. A good walk creates a situation for communication, it is not a lecture or the distribution of information, but an emotional experience with physical activity. It is important for the guide to have a personal story to tell and to show that research preceding the walk had been done.

A city can be considered as a museum and a walk a guided tour in a museum. Anna Lénárd as an artist thinks more boldly: in her opinion, a walk is itself a work of art, which is created by interaction and spontaneous happenings. Her conviction may become mainstream – she is writing her doctoral theses on this theme for the University of the Arts.

Another doctorate provides the basis for the walk Uninhabited Jewish Quarter, organised by Bupap. Sociologist Gergely Olt has chosen to research the theme of Inner Elisabeth Town’s metamorphosis, and he guides groups around this theme from Madách Square to Király Street. The route takes participants from the 19th century urban plans with reference to the square to the partying neighbourhood, both in space and time. It outlines the process how an area developed from the popular district of the middle classes to a place which is partly vacant and decayed, and partly occupied by so-called ruin pubs due to abandoned urban planning projects, the world war and property speculation – namely how it has become perfectly uninhabitable. This example shows that the traumas experienced by the city and its inhabitants did not cease after the war or the political changes of 1989, and there are buildings in Király Street which have suffered greatly over the past 100 years. 15 Király Street is protected by a barred gate, yet the group can get into the space where the only remains of the former ghetto wall can be seen. On one side of the wall the plaster is crumbling off the building, which is in a terrible condition. On the other side there is a brand-new construction. Gergely Olt explains to a group of mainly young people even on a weekday why a separate ‘town’ of 280 catering units has come about in one square kilometre. The young researcher has been visiting the buildings and has been conducting interviews with the residents for years. That is also why the group can enter the courtyards. He already guided groups, in the streets of the former Jewish Quarter years ago, and he had no idea that you could charge – it was not a trend at the time.

The historian and ethnographer Balázs Maczó is not from Budapest and he graduated from the University of Debrecen. His first job after university took him to the Local History Collection of Angyalföld (the 13th district of Budapest) where he had to work with and archive the photographs. The idea arose of not only presenting the interesting parts of the district but going round the sites personally. Commissioned by ‘Imagine Budapest’, he was guiding groups around the Bauhaus staircases in the buildings of New Leopold Town from 2009. It was then that he realized that city walks existed and they charged a participation fee. In 2011 he set up the working team ‘The House is Ours’, the Orczy Cultural Garden Association provided the legal background. Today Balázs Maczó works in the Kiscell Museum, but the walks continue uninterrupted. The 13th district is an inexhaustible source: ‘Kassák and Bárczy’ (Angyalföld of the 1910s from below and above) is a project involving the Kassák Museum, while the city-centre spy story connected to the book publisher Imre Cserépfalvy is an entirely different theme.

As a historian, Balázs Maczó seriously researches and compiles the walks, and the amount of preliminary work required to prepare a project depends on how accessible the sources are. Initially, he did not anticipate such good results for city walks. The demand derived from the broken connection between the city and its inhabitants, and many people seem to want to revive this connection.

This overview is clearly far from being complete, since there are many more enterprises which run city walks, in both Budapest and the country.

The event Budapest 100, held once a year, was launched by the OSA Archives and KÉK (Centre of Contemporary Architecture) in 2011. It is more than a walk, since the buildings which applied and have been selected organise varied events, including exhibitions in the staircases and talks with residents. The significance of the project goes far beyond a weekend activity: archivists and historians research the history of the buildings and volunteers involve and consult the residents, and provide information for visitors, apart from coordinating the events that take place in the buildings. The OSA Archives also set up the project Yellow Star Houses, which was arguably the event drawing the largest number of people during the 2014 Holocaust Memorial Year. It was also a city walk, involving nearly 1,600 buildings. It was carried out like the project Budapest 100 (events, exhibitions, discussions and readings took place in front of the buildings and in the courtyards), yet its effect was entirely different. Instead of spectacular posters, Stars of David were placed on the buildings concerned, which presented an emotionally charged situation for the survivors. Recalling the Holocaust in social media, in the press and at events, urged many people to talk for the first time about the traumas they and their families had experienced.