Miscellaneous stuff

The flood waters are starting to recede. I guess the Tisza reached about 10 meters (30 feet) above normal levels, but it stopped about 6 inches from the top of the levy. Plenty of water seeped through the cracks in the concrete wall, but other than some pubs located by the river, no one suffered any real damage (and even the pubs were serving beer last night while they were pumping their basements).


Here are some more images from my time in Budapest and Vienna. First we can see three of the more prominent landmarks in Vienna: On the left, the Austrian Parliament building, on the right in the distance is the Vienna City Hall, in all of it's gothic glory, and in the foreground is Athena, goddess of wisdom..."may she grant some to the Austrian legislative leaders" is how it must go.


After leaving the downtown Vienna area I ventured into the near northern countryside to the community of Nusberg, where they specialize in wine. At these so called Heurigens (wine gardens) you can eat traditional Austrian foods (pork knuckles, jellied pigs brains...I stayed away from these and focused more on the traditional roasted pork and some sort of a cheese-spinach mixture in a flaky crust) and drink great locally made wine. In the area, there a many little winding streets and walking paths. So, to build an appetite, I started walking up one of them into the hills. Along the way I found tiny, beautiful homes with equally tiny, beautiful gardens. Such a peaceful little neighborhood...if this neighborhood had cheeks, I would have squeezed them.


Finally, this is one of those things that I just had to get a picture of. Just a block off Vaci Utca in Budapest is this McDonald's. Why so important? I have read that this was the first McDonald's built behind the Iron Curtain (1988). However, another source says the first one was in nearby Gyor, Hungary. So, I'll have to leave that question hanging out there, and in the meantime, enjoy this one in downtown Budapest (By the way, it costs 60 ft - or about 28 cents - for ketchup when you buy French fries at a McDonald's in Hungary. The guy working there even said to me in a very broken English, "How do you say, there's no such thing as free lunch?" I sneered and walked away.)

With Tyson, it was the "holy left"

I found an article in the Budapest Sun that explains the mystery of Szent Istvan's right hand being preserved in the Budapest Basilica:

On regular days the Holy Right Hand (strangely, it is known in Hungarian as the Szent Jobb, or Holy Right) is on display in a dedicated chapel in the Szent István Bazilika (St Stephen's Cathedral), but on August 20 it goes on a procession. The procession of the Holy Right takes place around the cathedral, with the relic followed by dignitaries of state and church.

The history of the eerie bodypart is curious and remained unexplained for centuries. In 1951 one Dr Ádám Bockor examined the hand and offered an explanation.

He reached the conclusion that the 45 years between István's death and the opening of his sarcophagus in 1083 was enough for the complete disintegration of the corpse. The right hand was the highest bodypart of the corpse which was obviously lying on its back, and its preservation and mummification was because of the effect of the hot, dry air stuck between the rest of the disintegrated body and the cover of the sarcophagus.

Such a phenomenon is not rare in this climate: another example of it is the monastery of Brünn (today's Brno, in Czech Republic) where the mummified corpses of monks are one of the main attractions of the town. After István's death in 1038, turbulent decades followed with struggles for power, and Mercurius, the chaplain of Fehérvár (today's Székesfehérvár), the burial place of the saint-king, considered it safer to remove the corpse from it marble sarcophagus in the middle of Nagyboldogasszony cathedral and hide it in a tomb under the building. He removed the intact right hand and took it to a church on his own land on the banks of the River Berettyó to the north of what is now Nagyvárad (now Oradea in Romania).

Following István's canonization, King László visited the church, thus giving royal approval to the growing cult of the Holy Right Hand. The reverence of the relic became law enacted in the 1222 Aranybulla (Golden Bull), the Hungarian equivalent of England's Magna Charta.

The Holy Right then traveled to Fehérvár, Ragúza (Dubrovnik in modern day Croatia), and finally to Buda. The procession, started after the Revolution and War of Independence of 1848-49, resumed in 1989 after a 40 year forced hiatus under communism. While a military concert, trooping of the colors and changing of the guard in front of the Parliament, an air parade over the Danube and the procession are integral accessories of Saint Stephen's Day, the event that attracts the biggest crowds to both banks of the Danube as well as on balconies, rooms and roof tops overlooking the river, is the annual firework display.

So, there you have it. The right hand is kept in the Basilica only because the rest of the body had already disintigrated. Too bad, but honestly, would an entire body be as compelling as a right hand?

I didn't think so.

Other sites around Budapest

The Central Market is certainly worth a visit if you're ever in Budapest. This is a massive building (looks like a train station) filled with vendors selling mostly food. On the ground floor the vendors are set up in little cubes selling fresh produce...









...and various meat products.





Meantime, on the first floor (in America we'd call this the second floor, but that's how they do it in Europe), the vendors were selling prepared food. I had a very tasty turkey in paprika cream sauce for lunch. As you can see, the hall is packed with shopper and tourists, but believe me, many of those people are local Hungarians who do their shopping at the market each day.










Elsewhere, I toured the House of Terror. This isn't some amusement park fun house. Rather, it's a Hungarian museum dedicated to memorializing the past 70 years of oppression, first at the hands of the Nazi Germans, then from the Communist Soviets. It's a chilling display of the brutality realized under both regimes, and I read that it (understandably) is too difficult for many locals to enter. There are pictures of many of the execution victims at the hands of the Nazis and Soviets, and there are photos and names of many of the Hungarians who worked for these governments...some of them still living in Hungarian society. So, it's easy to understand how a place like this could trigger such emotion.

This picture symbolically captures the Hungarian uprising of 1956, in which a group of nationalists attempted to overthrow the Soviet dictatorship. For a matter of hours Hungary achieved independence as students and protesters took to the streets and the Parliament Building in Budapest. But, when Soviet tanks rolled into town, thousands were killed and the revolt was crushed. The phrase on the wall reads "Go Home Russians." The flag is that of Hungary at the time. In the center of the flag was a symbol of the communist regime. Protesters took to cutting these out and flying them as displayed.

Budapest Cathedrals

St. Matthias Cathedral sits atop Castle Hill in Buda, on the west side of the Danube River. Friday evening a brief shower passed, and this is what I saw as I looked skyward:







Meanwhile, across town, Pest's largest Cathedral is named for another great Hungarian king, Istvan (ISHT-vahn). Szent Istvan, or Saint Stephen's as it's known in western Christianity (Stephen was his Christian name after canonization) is just as beautiful but architecturally different than Matthias.









Inside, Istvan is wonderfully ornate with plenty of gold inlay.






Unfortunately, the most unique aspect of St. Istvan was unavailable when I visited. Inside, they keep the mummified right forearm of the great King Istvan. When I was there the church where it's kept was closed for a private ceremony. So, when I return with my dad in June, we'll have to make that a priority.

Vienna's St. Stephen's Cathedral

St. Stephen's, or Stephandom in German, is Austria's largest cathedral. It's located nearly in the center of the city and is surrounded very tightly by other buildings, making a good exterior picture very difficult. Here is one from the Internet.

I did, however, get inside of St. Stephen's and arrived just prior to the start of the 5PM daily mass, so I had the fortune of hearing the gigantic pipe organ being played. It's too bad a camera can't capture that sound.

Here are a few of the pictures that I did take

5PM mass at St. Stephen's is underway...that's incense hanging in the air like a haze:















The secondary chamber, on the left hand side of the cathedral:




















After a while, the sun came out and lit up the church:















Outside the church, children taunted the pigeons that roam the courtyard. (I thought black and white just captured the moment).