We Take a Walk On the Bright Side
We do, from time to time, revisit the question: what kind of city is this? We have discovered many dark sides of the city which is contemporary Hungarian landscape.
This time, let’s take a walk on the city’s bright side.
On a foggy November 17th day in the year 1873, forward-looking Hungarian magnates, ambitious merchants, and city elders decided that Buda, Óbuda and Pest should form one metropolis. Budapest, a city of slightly less than two million residents now is almost as diverse as it was in 1873. Almost – is the operative word here. Germans and Jews, Serbs and Greeks, Armenians and Slovaks formed the majority of the 1873 population. Soon each group began to assimilate and become Hungarian. This process suffered setbacks and led to the dark days of Budapest’s Jewish community in 1944, as the leftover shoes on the bank of the Danube offer testimony to tragic events.
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