Budapest police called on site for a hostel

Last night I was waiting for a friend in front of our building on Rakoczi street when a police car stopped and 4 cops got off. They casually walked over to my building and started checking out the names on the wall. I asked them what this was about and they said that they had been called by someone from the house. When asked what this was in reference to, they said, "Let this be our secret."

Wow, a secret! Police secret in our building...

The cops have been trying to ring someone but no one opened the front door for them and they had to ask me. I opened the door for them, knowing that there is another one inside. Surely, in 2-3 minutes the cops came out saying that they also need to get through the inner door which is also locked.

So I opened both doors and walked up with them. They came up to the second floor and started knocking on the door of a hostel. Someone in the building must have complained about the hostel again. The poor owner is being harassed by the police every few days because some old guy hates his guts.

I went upstairs and by the time I came down again, the 4 cops were on the street talking to 4 prostitutes. The cops were laughing, the prostitutes were laughing, everyone was having a good time. Life was back to normal.

Budapest news from the past

On this very day in 1905, the following news appeared in the Fitchburg Daily Sentinel, a newspaper from Massachusetts.

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Vienna, May 11. - A movement is on foot at Budapest to send Field Marshall Oyama a sword of honor from the Hungarian people. It is proposed that a committee of prominent Hungarians go to Japan in the summer and make the presentation.
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Although there is no indication how Oyama deserved this honor, it must be his role in the Russo-Japanese war, where the Japanese side wiped out the Russian forces.

Police chase in Budapest

Tonight as I was driving from Astoria towards the Elisabeth Bridge, suddenly 4-5 people ran into the traffic amidst the scream of tyres and blaring horns. Luckily, all the cars managed to stop without running over anyone. Once they ran across the road in front of me, I could see that these were members of a police squad chasing someone through the night. They all had helmets on and guns drawn.

To be honest, I have never seen such a thing, especially not in Budapest. You never see a policeman with a naked gun. And now there were half a dozen of them chasing someone with the intent to shoot. Wow! What did the guy do?

Perhaps we will see something on the news tonight, I will keep my eyes open.

Hungary in pictures

A great collection of photographs from old Budapest:

Hungary and Budapest in Pictures

This is an old guidebook from around 1910. The interesting thing is that it describes parts of Hungary which are no longer in Hungary today but in Romania, Croatia, Slovakia, etc.

The photographs are also great, especially if you know how they look today. Here is, for example, the West Railway Station, called Nyugati in Hungarian.

Traffic Chaos in Budapest: Construction of the new M4 metro line

As the building of the fourth metro line of Budapest progresses, more and more surface areas are getting affected. Most recently, workers appeared on the Buda bank of the Danube. Index, a Hungarian on-line news portal reports that road blocks and traffic jams are to be expected in Southern Buda during the following months. (Traffic jams, of course, are always expected on either side of the river, no matter what.)

The M4 line will start from the city center of Budapest, Keleti Railway Station and will cross the Danube around Gellért Square, going further through Móricz Zsigmond Square all the way to the outskirts of Buda.

Most importantly for those who drive or take buses in Budapest, the roads along the Buda bank of the Danube near Gellért Square (Műegyetem rakpart in the first place) will be closed for five months starting next week. According to experts, this will result in huge traffic jams throughout the entire Buda side of the city. Later on, Bartók Béla Street, stretching from Gellért Square to Móricz Zsigmond Square will be closed partially as a result of the construction of the metro line and related public utilities works. Coupled with the construction tram lines #4-6, this will make the summer traffic of Budapest even more chaotic and frustrating.

A dead diplomat in a rum barrel: A horror story from Communist Hungary

In recent weeks, both Hungarian and foreign papers published a story from Hungary about the body of a diplomat found in a rum barrel. Revealing more details of the mystery each day, finally, Hungarian journalists arrived to the conclusion that the case never really happened, and even though the story gained considerable publicity in the world media, it was an urban legend.

The original story appeared in a Hungarian cops magazine, “Zsaru” (“Cop”), and was shortly accepted by Hungarian and foreign news agencies as factual information. According to the original article in “Zsaru,” during the last years of the Communist era, a Hungarian diplomat died while traveling in Jamaica and returning his body to Hungary would have been both expensive and complicated. Hence, the wife of the dead diplomat had hidden her husband's body in a barrel of Jamaican rum, and after arriving home, she put the barrel in the basement of their house. Years later, after the widow died, the new owner of the house wanted to rebuild the property, and the workers found the barrel of rum during the construction. They drank the content of the barrel, and found the dead body of the diplomat.

In reality, however, neither police records, nor common sense corroborate this fantastic story. Pathology experts say that the taste of the rum would have been awful if a dead body had been “marinating” in the barrel for years. On the other hand, “barrel experts” (i.e. barrel makers and people who have already seen a 300 liter barrel similar to the one mentioned in the original article) state that the body of an adult would have hardly fit into a barrel of that size, and even if it did, it would have left very little room for the rum.

Police officials at Szeged, the city near which the body was allegedly discovered, also dismiss the story. During the Communist regime, bringing a barrel of Jamaican rum through customs would have cost a lot more than bringing back the body of a deceased person to Hungary. Moreover, since traveling to foreign countries was under heavy surveillance in the entire Eastern Block, it would have been impossible for anyone in a diplomatic status with a diplomatic passport to disappear. Also, the former police chief of Szeged who was in charge during the time the case allegedly occurred claims never having such a case.