Memento Park

The square in front of the main gate is called Witness Square, and the big concrete tribune on it is a 1:1 replica of the one that stood on Felvonulási tér in central Budapest with an 8-metre bronze Stalin on top. Party leaders stood on it at Stalin’s feet on communist holidays and waved at crowds that had no choice but to cheer.

On the evening of 23 October 1956, the first day of the uprising, the crowd sawed the statue off at the knees and pulled it down, and the boots stayed on the plinth. That is what is up there now: a pair of boots and nothing above them, the most photographed thing in the park.

You can climb the steps to the balcony and wave at whoever is below. Go inside too. Hidden in the grandstand is a storeroom with the bust of Lenin as a child, which used to decorate a Soviet-style pioneer camp.

Through the gate, the park is five semicircles of statues set inside one big circle of red-brick wall, with a flowerbed in the shape of a star in the middle. The 41 works were made between 1945 and 1989 for streets and squares all over the city, and each has a numbered plaque giving its name in Hungarian and English, the sculptor, the date and where it stood.

The ones to find by name: Zsigmond Kisfaludi Strobl’s Liberating Soviet Soldier of 1947, which stood on Gellért Hill; Jenő Kerényi’s Captain Ostapenko of 1951; and István Kiss’s Republic of Councils monument of 1969, a giant running figure with a flag that turns up on every postcard.

The park does not explain the statues, on purpose. Eleőd wanted you to think about the period that made them, so the booklet from the desk or the guided tour is what turns a pleasant walk into an understanding of what you are looking at.

The entrance is a red-brick facade with a pediment and two big arches, and the two most famous names in the park are parked in them: Pál Pátzay’s Lenin of 1965, which stood on Dózsa György út, and György Segesdi’s angular Marx and Engels of 1971. The joke is that the facade is grand and there is nothing behind it but open ground.

Look back at it once you are inside. From the park side the arches frame the two statues against the sky, which is the better photograph.

The barracks on Witness Square holds the cash desk and the Red Star Store, and behind them a photo exhibition and a small cinema. The exhibition covers the two moments the park is about: the 1956 revolution and the collapse of the system in 1989 and 1990.

The cinema shows The Life of an Agent, a 2004 montage cut from the training films the Ministry of the Interior made for its secret police between 1958 and 1988.

It comes in four parts of 10 to 15 minutes each: how to hide a bug, how to search a house, how to recruit an informer and how to run a network. It is in Hungarian with English subtitles, and it gives the statues outside their weight.

It is also the only cover in the park, so it is where you go if the rain comes.

The first thing you see inside the entrance is an original Trabant, the East German people’s car with a body of pressed fibre and plastic that families across the Eastern Bloc waited years for. You are meant to open the door and sit in it, and everyone does.

If you want the full version, the park runs the Trabant transfer. A restored car collects you from your accommodation at 09:30 and a driver-guide takes you round the park. Details are in our tours guide.