Szent György tér

This is the emptiest square in the whole quarter, and that emptiness is the clearest mark the war left here.

Until the winter of 1944, this is where the Ministry of Defence and the palace of Archduke Joseph stood, part of a street front that ran on without a break to either side. During the siege, the square sat right in the middle of the defensive line, and after fifty days of artillery there was little left of it. What happened to the parts that survived tells you a lot about the years that followed. The burnt-out shell of the ministry stayed standing for decades, too badly damaged to use and too loaded with meaning to tear down, the impacts still visible in its facade. Everything around it was demolished, levelled, and sown with grass.

The pavilion of the funicular you just stepped out of was still here in 1945 too, a skeleton half shot away.

These days they are building on this hill again, and pieces of the old street front are coming back, which in Hungary stirs up a debate about exactly which past you are rebuilding. For now, you are standing on a field of grass where a city is supposed to be.

We head into the long residential street that runs north.