Budapest plans expansion of Communist statue park

One of Budapest's most unique exhibitions, a park next to Balatoni út (District XXII) filled with public statues erected during the Soviet era, will be expanded into a 3,000-square-meter education and exhibition center by 2009, writes Népszava. The planned construction of new buildings, which will house permanent and temporary exhibitions, conference halls, a restaurant and a café, will cost Ft 1.5 billion (roughly €6 million). After the expansion, the site now known as Szoborpark (Statue Park) will be named Mementó Park.

The statues exhibited at the park stood at Budapest squares until the political changes at the end of the 1990s. There were heated debates about their fate, while some wanted to erase the past and melt them down, others campaigned to save them as relics for future generations. Questions also arose about their value as artistic creations, because many people saw them as little more than symbols of tyranny. Eventually, the statues were saved, and plans were made to place them in a field far from the city center. The grass was to be cut regularly and site protected from illegal metal collectors.

It was architect Ákos Eleőd who initiated the project to create a true work of art from the 42 statues consigned to the statue park by Budapest districts in 1991. The first stage of his plan - new pedestals for the statues and a giant gate - has been realized, but the construction of buildings around the trapezoid "square" in front of the gate is yet to begin. A longer side of the Tanú tér (Witness Square) is closed off by the entrance gate, with an identicl replica of the boots from the gigantic statue of Stalin that used to stand on 56-osok tere - then known as Sztálin tér (District XIV).

"I didn't recreate the Stalin statue. It is a memento of the revolution," said Eleőd of his work, which was inaugurated on the 50th anniversary of the event in 2006.

He hopes that the two buildings planned for the square will be finished in time for the 20th anniversary of the 1989 regime change. The normal-sized buildings are designed to make the inhuman proportions of the gate and Stalin pedestal al the more apparent.

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