Captain Grumpy rides again

May 11, 2007

Well, maybe I was a bit too harsh. Getting out of Budapest was easier than riding in, whereas it's usually the other way round. A lot of that could be due to having bought a guide to cycling in the city, which showed the bike paths and the more welcoming roads. And the paths are there, sure enough; it's just that they are signposted intermittently and only with what appear to be the most local of destinations. Unless you know the city, they don't get you anywhere but to a state of confusion.

The routes are hardly scenic. Mostly they are converted tracks beside high fences behind chemical plants and so on. My observation is that, there not being many cyclists in Budapest, not many people ride them. The consequence is that drivers approaching at 90 degrees don't expect cyclists crossing in front of them. Only late do they concede right of way and a couple of times drivers got as far as locking their wheels in a skid. Nothing went wrong but there was a constant feeling that it was only a matter of time.

Anyway, we got out of the city and we got to Statue Park by a route other than the main road, which another bike-rider had told us was nerve-wracking. And Statue Park? Well, out on the city limits is an open space to which the city took many of the statues of the communist era when the old

Nothing like communism for a better class of statue

order changed. Some statues were damaged and maybe others were wrecked. But by foresight, commercial sense or perhaps just a feeling that something ought to be done with these things but nobody knew what, they were gathered up and carted out to this park.

And there they stand, around 40 of them, some busts or figures of politicians more familiar to Hungarians than to the rest of the world but some obvious, like Lenin,

Revolution turns full circle. This statue is of Lenin's boots. Once it was all of Lenin but only his boots survived after the crowd got at him with the fall of communism.

and some wonderfully vainglorious in the inspirational style. I love statues of that sort - soldiers standing up to some unseen threat on the horizon, brave mothers comforting their children, muscular workers heaving a hammer or standing ready with a spanner. The one condition, rarely betrayed, is that the figure must have one arm raised. It is an axiom, so far as I can see right across the world, that heroes of communist sculpture always have one arm to the sky. It could be Lenin addressing a crowd or lifting a book of truths or it could be a dying soldier with his rifle kept until his last breath above his head, but behind the Iron Curtain, in China and in India, every communist sculpture I have seen has this one raised arm.

It is up to you to decide what the world lost with the end of communism but it's undeniable, surely, that it lost an art form.

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