We don’t have Halloween in Hungary, we have All Saints Day! – states the poster. Halloween is not a desirable holiday for conservative Christian Hungary. In Hungary “Mindenszentek” (All Saints’ Day) and “Halottak Napja” (All Souls’ Day) have always been important Catholic holidays. Quite recently, in 2000, All Saints’ Day even became a National Holiday. Right wing political parties, especially […]
Hollywood superstar Tom Hanks is in Budapest for the shooting of his new movie “Inferno”, a sequel to the blockbuster “The Da Vinci Code.” He loves Budapest and says Mexican food is fabulous in the Hungarian capital. I know his favorite Mexican restaurant, but I cannot tell you. Hanks values his privacy and I swore to the owner that I […]
I start to think that Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and his inner circle have lost touch with reality. Police forces conduct anti-terror training exercises in other EU countries, but it is unprecedented that a night-time police drill is staged as a propaganda tool for a sitting Prime Minister. A couple of days ago Mr. Orbán invited journalists and politicians to […]
There is nervousness in Fidesz, Hungary’s ruling party, as very low turnout in a referendum aimed at rejecting EU-wide “migrant quotas” for Hungary means that the vote may be invalid, and thus an embarrassing defeat for Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. Nationally, turnout at 3:00 PM local time was just 31%, according to statistics released by the National Election Office. The […]
The narrative surrounding the explosion that seriously injured two police officers in Central Budapest on Saturday night, exactly one week before the country’s anti-migrant referendum, is beginning to take a rather strange turn. It was odd enough that Hungarian authorities said nothing formally about the attack and no press conference was held until 20 hours after the incident, leaving the […]
There is “no doubt” in the mind of Hungary’s national police chief, Károly Papp, that police officers were the explicit targets of the explosion that occurred Saturday night just after 10:30 PM and which severely injured two officers on patrol near the corner of Teréz Körút and Király utca. Police Chief Papp held a news conference in Budapest early Sunday […]
A bomb went off late Saturday night in central Budapest, seriously injuring two police officers. Preliminary information suggests that an explosive device was detonated in a store located on Teréz Körút and the nails found in the area indicate that it may have been a nail bomb. The two officers were patrolling the area when the bomb went off, shortly […]
If architect József Fischer had his way, much of central Budapest as we know it today would have been gutted, making way for what may have been considered seventy years ago as a groundbreaking modern utopia. The Urbanista blog, associated with the Index news site, dug up some fascinating plans and proposals from 1946, for how Budapest might look in […]
The Living Memorial, a grassroots monument in Budapest’s Liberty Square, in memory to the 600,000 victims of the Holocaust in Hungary, was vandalised this weekend, shortly after the neo-Nazi Kuruc.info website published an article threatening to destroy the monument. Photographs displayed at the site were torn and other items of remembrance added to the Living Memorial by survivors and descendants […]
Hungarian journalist Katalin Erdélyi submitted a referendum proposal to the National Election Commission, in the hope of giving Hungarian citizens the right to vote on whether Budapest should continue its bid to host the 2024 Summer Games. Both the Hungarian government and the Budapest municipal government are enthusiastically supporting the bid to host the Olympics in the Hungarian capital, even […]
