After six years living in old buildings in districts VI and VII of Budapest, we moved to district XIII and joined the multitudes of Hungarians living in the 'panel' flats which are still characteristic of cities all over the ex-communist bloc.
Budapest VI : Dózsa György út |
Budapest XIII : Róbert Károly krt. |
"In every factory and office block employees were 'volunteered' to march as representatives of their place of work. On the day itself groups of people would begin to gather in every side street off Dózsa György út as early as six o’clock, banners, balloons and beer in hand. Their numbers swelled to tens of thousands by ten o’ clock, the official start of the procession. Then the tribune next to the statue of Lenin would fill with the leaders of the Party, and socialist workers' songs would boom out through every speaker.
On the live television broadcast, a homogeneous mass of banner-waving people could be seen singing as they marched the length of Dózsa György út for two hours or so, while the voice over the speakers called, ‘Long live the Red Star shoe factory of…; Long live the Socialist Brotherhood Co-operative farm of…’. I walked out of the house into Garay tér and was swept along with the crowd... * Now, on our walks in the park we watched as the facades of the two art galleries and the pillars of Heroes' Square were draped in black cloth: Imre Nagy was to be reburied at a huge ceremony at which all those executed after '56 would also be commemorated." |
"The 60s and 70s had seen whole areas of Budapest, in fact all major towns, litter their skylines with such buildings. Like voracious weeds they sprouted in hitherto unpopulated areas...
The Hungarians called them ‘panel’ buildings, a literal description of the uniform concrete panels from which they were constructed. Each slab had an electric socket in the centre of one side, while others had a hole for a door or window to be fitted...Their complete uniformity even extended to the fact that every such flat was handed over with the same yellow curtains sagging at the windows. Soundproofing was not a feature of these dwellings and standing in a corridor provided an aural patchwork of the lives of the building’s occupants: their yapping dogs and crying babies, their booming hi-fis and out-of-tune pianos, their smoker’s coughs and drunken quarrels. " |
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