Ninety-Four Cents on Gellért Hill

A Budapest memory, 1995 and 2026

When I backpacked around Europe after college, I remember Budapest being one of my favorite cities. And the centerpiece of my memories was the Citadella. On race-weekend Saturday, Kate and Cameron headed off to the Hungaroring for qualifying, and I decided to revisit some places I had been to long ago.

On the terrace of the Citadella, with a gin tonic and my phone for research, I began to investigate and remember.

Part One: Arrival

I came in on the Orient Express. The cheap section, which matters, because the name promises something it did not deliver. What it meant in 1995 was a long ride into Keleti with a bag and not one forint.

A stranger met me on the platform offering a place to crash, so I followed him. This sounds naive thirty years later and wasn’t. Runners worked the international trains, paid by the head, and they knew who to look for: someone off a long haul with hard currency, no local money, nowhere to sleep. We got on a bus that took us across the river and north into the thirteenth district.

Dózsa György út 152. Enter on Angyalföldi, fifty metres from the stop.

Water on the floor. Bars on the windows. Burn marks on the sheets. But no requirement to pay the 550 forints (~$4) until morning!

What I wrote that week: Last night I stayed in a total dive.

The water and the bars were not neglect. They were the original specification. The building went up in 1911 as a municipal lodging house for the poor of Budapest, with a library, a lounge, washing facilities and a soup kitchen.

It is a homeless shelter again now. When I asked AI about finding it, the response was a simple, “DO NOT ENTER.” My night there wasn’t the building’s life. It was the gap between two halves of the same one. And a place where several stories originated.

Part Two: The basement

There was a bar in the basement, open around the clock, and I went to it before I went to the bunk. There was no way I could have slept in that trap without getting a few pints in me first.

In a building designed to wash and feed the destitute (vaulted, tiled, drains in the floor), the basement is where in 1995 you could get a drink at three in the morning so you could face the sheets.

I hit the bar with an English guy and a Welsh guy named Graham. Graham told me about a psycho Vietnam veteran at a hostel in Kraków who liked to beat up Americans. He’d been there a month earlier.

I filed it as a curiosity. Turns out it was a warning…

Part Three: The upgrade

In the morning I found a currency exchange, paid and I walked. Several miles, then up a huge hill, to the Citadella Hotel.

Much better. Clean sheets, and the specific detail I bothered to write down: no black burn marks. A great view of the city. And the place I started to write this post. Now touristy and busy. But sitting where I did 30 years ago, researching, remembering and smiling at it all. 

The Citadella was a fortress. Franz Joseph ordered it built two years after Austrian troops crushed the 1848 revolution, and its cannons pointed inward, at the city, not out at any enemy. Hungarian forced labour built the thing meant to keep Hungarians in line. It never fired a shot. It worked.

Then it was a garrison, and a prison, and an anti-aircraft position, and an air-raid shelter, and eventually the barracks got turned into rooms you could rent. I knew roughly this much at the time. The journal says: my hotel is in the citadella built by the Hapsburgs.

Back then, twenty-four hours in Budapest and I had gone from the basement of a poorhouse to a fort built to keep poorhouse people quiet.

I stayed five days.

Part Four: The five days

From my new perch, I walked all around Pest. The next day I did Buda.

What I saw, in the order I listed it: the National Gallery, which was huge, and where we caught a Hungarian Philharmonic concert playing in the middle of it. The History Museum. Modern art, where I saw a Picasso. A political cartoon exhibit. The World Press Photo show for 1994. A tour of the caverns under the castle. Some other museum I couldn’t pronounce. An art show I snuck into. The castle, the palace, Heroes’ Square, the Russian Monument.

The caverns were a swindle and I loved them anyway. They were supposed to hold wax figures from Hungary’s past. What they held was plastic “bodies”, in snarled wigs, fifty years old at least. I wrote: absolutely hideous.

I went to Titus, the Mozart opera. My review, complete:

walk slowly onto stage, stand still and sing, run away

Followed by my decree of now being cultured.

I remember being in a jazz club one night, early, writing while I waited for the music to start and for Dan, a guy from the hotel, who might or might not show. That sentence is the whole trip in miniature. Sitting in a room in a foreign city with hours to kill, a notebook, and a loose plan involving a person whose last name I never wrote down.

My analysis: I dig Budapest!

Part Five: The wine

One night I partied with a typical ensemble – a Brit dude, a French girl, two Australian girls and three Americans. Bull’s Blood wine and bread and honey.

The next night I had Bull’s Blood again. Lots and lots of Bull’s Blood. Too much Bull’s Blood.

I bought a bottle for the equivalent of ninety-four cents. Someone produced one that cost over a dollar and we laughed at the decadence.

The product was the problem. The rules that made Egri Bikavér mean anything arrived in 1997, two years after that night. The name on the bottle was decoration, and a signal to watch out. Now, I learned, they produce some very nice wines. I did see them on my return, but never had a chance to verify. 

Part Six: The one photograph

At the World Press Photo exhibit I stood in front of a picture taken in the former Yugoslavia. An old woman, probably ninety, on a bus, looking out through the window and crying, as a hand reached to her against the glass from outside.

What I wrote, at twenty-something, in a notebook, in a jazz club, waiting for a man named Dan:

They probably never saw each other again after that good-bye.

That is the best sentence in the journal and I have not improved on it in thirty-one years. Years later I would visit most of the former Yugoslavia with my wife and learn more about what was happening while I was backpacking, care-free.

Part Seven: The night train out

From Budapest I took the night train to Kraków and shared a cabin with a Romanian.

He had spent six weeks trying to reach France to join the French Foreign Legion. Survive five years, become a French citizen. He knew it was a long shot. He had gone from Transylvania to the German border and back to Bucharest several times, and was now going to try to get west through Sweden.

He noticed how similar our passports looked, and what an enormous difference there was between the two.

“What’s my crime, that I was born in Romania?”

I was travelling for fun on a document that opened every border in front of me. He was travelling for a life on one that closed them. We were in the same cabin, sharing bread and cheese.

Part Eight: Kraków

After very little sleep I arrived and went looking for a hostel.

Walking into the dorm room, I heard a man say: “I didn’t spend 14 months in ‘Nam to put up with this shit!”

My heart stopped. Graham’s story had a body in it now, and it was in my room. Maybe I’ll tell that story another time.

The listings

Both entries, found in Let’s Go Europe 1995 archive.