Tourists, Signs and the City The Semiotics of Culture in an Urban Landscape

Michelle M. Metro-Roland Western Michigan University, USA © Michelle M. Metro-Roland 2011

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Metro-Roland, Michelle Marie. Tourists, signs and the city : the semiotics of culture in an urban landscape. -- (New directions in tourism analysis) 1. Culture and tourism. 2. Culture--Semiotic models. 3. Symbolic interactionism. 4. Tourism--Psychological aspects. 5. Tourists--Hungary--Budapest--Attitudes. 6. Peirce, Charles S. (Charles Sanders), 1839-1914-- Knowledge--Semiotics. I. Title II. Series 338.4'791-dc22

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Metro-Roland, Michelle M. Tourists, signs and the city : the semiotics of culture in an urban landscape / by Michelle M. Metro-Roland. p. cm. -- (New directions in tourism analysis) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7546-7809-0 (hardback) -- ISBN 978-0-7546-9603-2 (ebook) 1. Tourism. 2. Cities and towns. 3. Tourism--Social aspects. 4. Signs and symbols--Social aspects. 5. Peirce, Charles S. (Charles Sanders), 1839-1914. 6. Semiotics. 7. Culture--Semiotic models. I. Title. G155.A1M446 2011 306.4'819--dc23 2011015893 ISBN 9780754678090 (hbk) ISBN 9780754696032 (ebk) II

Printed and bound in Great Britain by the MPG Books Group, UK. Contents

List of Maps and Figures vii Preface ix

1 Introduction 1

2 Peirce, Signs and Interpretation 11

3 Landscape and Tourism 25

4 The City—A Brief Introduction 41

5 Tourists in the City—Means and Methods 63

6 Signs in the City 75

7 Markets and Culture 111

8 Conclusions and Implications 139

Appendices 149 References 151 Index 167 Chapter 6 Signs in the City

The interviews and the photographs, separately and taken together, offer tantalizing glimpses into the ways tourists were interpreting culture in the city. We have spoken about the history of the city, especially its architectural legacy, and the general conception of the way in which guidebooks shape collateral knowledge. However, once the tourist arrives on the ground, that information, along with their other conceptual baggage, is brought face-to-face with the vividness of being in the city. What follows is a discussion organized around the themes which emerged in the photos as well as the interviews. These include 1) the role of linguistic markers; 2) the question of disorder in interpreting the past, 3) the tensions between the socialist and post-socialist history, 4) the textual quality of architectural style for urban landscapes 5) the everyday city and its objects. The images and interview comments it is argued in the conclusion reveal the indexical role of location.

The Writing on the Wall—Signs, Language and Graffiti

The so called “linguistic landscape” is the material manifestations of language in place, the collection of street names, shop signs, notices, adverts, graffiti and other textual items (Shohamy and Gorter 2009). This landscape is crucial for the smooth functioning of a literate society, and because of its ubiquity is a key element of the tourist prosaic and the experience of cultural tourism especially when the language is other than the tourists’ own. As long as it does not impinge upon the visitor’s enjoyment or cause disruptions in the experience of the city, language difference remains an important marker of place differentiation. As we will see it was among the most commented upon aspects of a sign of “Hungarianess.” Images of the linguistic landscape were captured in the form of commercial signage, location markers including street signs, and graffiti.

Shop Signs

Commercial life is a key function in cities, from the fora found in Ancient Rome to Fifth Avenue in New York. While some participants photographed the folksy souvenirs available in shops in the Castle District, others took many pictures of the 76 Tourists, Signs and the City many local, small scale shops found throughout the city.1 One photographer was particularly interested in a shop called Telefonía selling used cell phones which the photographer had “never seen.”2 Like many shops this one listed on its sign its wares in Hungarian first and then in English, which is why the participant could comment upon it. The use of English in commercial places is both functional, a message to non-Magyar speakers, but it also signifies to the Magyar speaker that it is hip, “international” and contemporary. Two separate photographers shot the Ruszwurm sign, the tiny coffee house in the Castle District which dates from the early 1800s. The actual name on the sign, is a sign, in a semiotic sense, indicating all that is embodied in the concept of this café which the Vendég Váró calls “an atmospheric, confectionary furnished in the Empire style” (45). The Kiscelli Museum which sits on the outskirts of the city has an important collection of old commercial signs, which as opposed to those one finds today, utilized symbology, created in the round often out of metal. For the most part those signs have disappeared except for nostalgic reconstructions, such as one Owl sign taken outside what appears to be a folk craft store in the Castle District.3 Entirely absent from the commercial signage photos surprisingly were the elaborate neon signs that date from the 1950s and 1960s, many now defunct but still in situ on buildings throughout the city. Others have made their way into the Elektrotechnikai Múzeum [Electrotechnical Museum]. In interviews the shops and commercial enterprises were not mentioned with a great deal of frequency, with a few notable exceptions. One pair were struck when they went into a “locals shopping store, and it looked really poor on the outside but inside it was fabulous” (Interview 14), and they also spoke about trying to find a pharmacy. Enzensberger’s (1989 [1985]: 102) mid-1980s essay on Hungary gives a sense of why this would be a challenge:

I’ve spent whole days reading the wounds and splendors of the city of Budapest from its doors, walls, and nameplates. I think of it as an ambiguous, puzzling, dirty panorama. Every sign in this country seems to promise a secret to the flaneur from abroad and impresses upon him that he is condemned to remain an

1 Photos 9.22T; 11.21T; 11.24T; 11.25T; 16.17T. The numbers in parentheses refer to the photographers and the image number which are archived with the author. A selection of the 357 photos will appear in the chapter. The numbers are included in the text in order to give the reader a general idea of the number of photos on a particular theme that appear in the collection. Each camera held 25 to 26 exposures, and the numbers assigned to each photo reveal where in the order of images the pictures was taken, in reverse order. In other words, a picture with an image number of 25 indicates that it was the first picture taken, in reverse successive order all the way to 0 or 00. The T indicates that this was a tourist. While cameras were also given to Hungarians, those pictures are not treated in this work. See Metro-Roland (2009a) for a discussion of the Hungarian photos. 2 Photo 12.20T. 3 Photo 21.7T. Signs in the City 77

idiot, an illiterate. Gyógyszertár, for example. Who could decode such a word? And yet, behind the frosted glass and the wood paneling is concealed nothing more than a quite ordinary pharmacy.

The pair mentioned above recognized the Green Cross image and so were able to locate one. The experience of a young American couple (Interview 1) however was more frustrating, and bore a close resemblance to the complaint of Enzensberger. They unsuccessfully sought out linguistic clues in the cityscape to guide them to a pharmacy but gyógyszertar the word bears little resemblance to pharmacia, patika or apotheka, words they might have recognized more easily. They were bitterly disappointed when upon locating a shop called Drogerie Mart they discovered that, in fact, no actual drugs were to be found, only shampoos, soaps, and tissues. In the course of one of the interviews in the Castle District the interviewee asked for help in locating a pharmacy. These experiences shed light on the frustrations that the Hungarian linguistic landscape could bring when trying to undertaken everyday tasks. For many people language was the defining factor given for the city being Hungarian and the logical follow up question was whether this impacted negatively the tourists’ experiences, that is whether the language posed a barrier. This also allowed for a glimpse into their level of interaction beyond mere “sight- seeing” of Hungarian culture; in other words, how far were they moving out of the touristscape which exists in an almost exclusive English language space within the larger Hungarian speaking local space of the cityscape as a whole? It should be noted that in the capital English is the primary language of tourism followed by German. What ought also to be kept in mind is that, as the list of nationalities of interviewees reveals, for many of them English was a second language (if not a third or fourth). The expectation of English was high among interviewees and photographers as well no matter what their mother tongue might have been. For example one participant from Sweden photographed a plaque in the Castle District which was glossed as “Opposite of Hilton Hotel letters not understandable–no translation.”4 The comment reveals the belief that English will be used as the lingua franca of tourism and the expectation that within the touristscape not only should those working in this realm be able to converse but so should the linguistic landscape. Interviewees had numerous observations about language in the city. “I see signs and newspapers in a foreign language” (Interview 2). “Everything is written in a foreign language” (Interview 10). “The signs, language” (Interview 16). “I don’t know, all the signs are in Hungarian but it’s hard to figure out if a word is Polish, Czech or Hungarian” (Interview 1). “Some Turkish influence, can tell from the street signs, the language is weird can see Turkish influence but can not make it at all a word” (Interview 21).”The language is incomprehensible” (Interview 22). “The Hungarian language is so strange, store names look like a graffito”

4 Photo 1.21T. 78 Tourists, Signs and the City

(Interview 23). “The language, it’s kind of different from other languages” (Interview 33). “The strange spelling of words, it’s a pretty unique language” (Interview 42). One interviewee took a far more romantic view referring to “the colors and the melody of the language, unspeakable words” (Interview 9). Street signs are one of the spaces where Hungarian predominates. Photographers captured several pictures of these including signs for Zrínyi Street 5–1, Vám Street 11–9 and Király lépcső [King Stairway].5 The Vám street sign, from the Víziváros [Watertown] district of the city, employs a pointing hand to indicate the range of building numbers found on that block and this was glossed on the location card as “hand in street sign—not seen anywhere else.” The linguistic landscape of street signs is rich with historical reference, but it seems that much of this was lost on visitors. While there were general references to Hungarian on streets signs as seen in the previous comments, the toponymic legacy was not mentioned. The example of the photo from the Yellow Underground offers a glimpse into the importance of history for toponymy. In the 1890s as part of the expansion of the city out along the radial boulevard, Hungary became the first country on the continent to have a subway, the Millenniumi Földallati vasút [Millennial Underground Railroad]. It retains the dimensions and façade of its fin-de-siècle origins. The stations are tiny, and literally just a short flight of steps underground with decorative iron supporting structures. The trains are small and yellow, each with only three cars. Photographers snapped station signs in the metro and above ground. The latter photo demonstrates a rather typical fact of Hungarian toponomy, that is the fact that the names of streets and squares are a primer in Hungarian history. While this is well known to Hungarians, the connections between place name and historical figures often remains mute. Most tourists are challenged enough trying to locate places without having to tack on a history lesson as well. The text reads “Vörösmarty utca, Földallatí, Vörösmarty tér felé” which translates as “Vörösmarty street, Underground, in the direction of Vörösmarty Square.” The latter is the end stop of the Yellow line, a large square on which sits Gerbeaud Café, and from where Váci Street the pedestrian shopping zone frequented by tourists begins. The former is a rather quiet cross street along Andrássy Avenue about midway along the line. Tourists would be forgiven for mixing the two up. Mihály Vörösmarty died in the 1850s and along with Sándor Petőfi, is considered a national poet. His significance is attested to by the sheer size and scope of the monument to him which fills the eponymous square at one end of the Yellow Line and the fact the Budapest street map lists 13 different streets or squares named for Vörösmarty in the city.

5 Photos 6.4T; 12.16T; 19.11T. Signs in the City 79

Figure 6.1 Palatinus Strand Sign (Photo 5.20T)

Multi-lingualism is admittedly high in the country, and is a basic prerequisite for employment in the tourism industry. Where Russian was once mandatory, and students’ poor grades in the subject were worn as a badge of honor, today English has joined German as a preferred language of study. Many former Russian language teachers simply changed their orientation after getting crash courses in English in the 1990s in order to remain au courant. The number of people who said the language posed a barrier for them were by far in the minority. English it was noted was spoke by “the important people” (Interview 34), and in the hotels (Interview 1). Out in the city there were mixed results. “In the stores, you ask if they speak English and they answer no in English” (Interview 33) while another pair commented that “People speak German or English, they seem to be good linguists” (Interview 50). As we have seen above the signs all seemed to be in a “foreign language” but others noticed the multilingual aspect of signs, in German, English and sometimes French, which offer practical information to help people get around (Interview 29). These include brown direction arrows that point people to key sites throughout the city, but once there plaques on monuments failed to offer any translation unlike other cities (Interview 49). This shifts the interpretive burden almost exclusively onto the tourist. There are other surprising places where Hungarian dominates. One of the most intriguing pictures was the map of the Palatinus Strand (see Figure 6.1). It features a visual guide to the bath complex on Margaret Island, a site which is ostensibly in the middle of the tourist area and yet the map itself, painted on a large meter and a 80 Tourists, Signs and the City half long board, is only in Hungarian, locating the playgrounds, waterslides, bűfe [snack bar], changing room and various pools within the swimming complex. This is not unique to the Palatinus, as other bathing complexes that get a large amount of tourist traffic such as the Széchenyi baths also lack a sufficient amount of foreign language signage, and Gellért’s layout was said to be “confusing” (Interview 22). There are enough of these Magyar only spaces in the midst of the Inner City tourist areas to call into question the ways in which language in material form shapes the contours of the foreigner’s experience of the cityscape as touristscape in a positive way, contributing to placeness versus putting up barriers to enjoyment. From this research it appears that the former is the case. Unofficial and unsanctioned contributions to the linguistic landscape were also noteworthy, in comments and photos of the ubiquitous graffiti which covers the city.6 The overwhelming amount of graffiti is shocking to the unprepared. In interviews it was mentioned upon over and over. “Yesterday we were disappointed looking around, we saw lots of graffiti, things were run down but this morning we found a more touristy area. We were a little disappointed but we’re loving it this morning. Picture of something in our heads, a picture postcard” (Interview 14). “Lots of graffiti, you don’t read about it in the guidebooks” (Interview 16). “The Castle District in Buda yesterday and St Mathias church was magnificent, wonderful décor; the only negative is going back to the residential areas, they’re graffiti strewn. Hopefully it will improve, there was so much repression for so long now let that expression out; that’s the down side of freedom.” One pair had an extended debate between themselves over this very topic; the man arguing that the graffiti was a sign of new found freedom, while the woman insisted it was just ugly vandalism (Interview 23). There are few things in the city which avoid being marked by graffiti; neither churches nor other culturally significant sites are spared. In fact of the two pictures taken of the Anonymous statue in the City Park one was marked with a graffito, the other was not.7 Some of the graffiti are tags, though others are far more elaborate. The graffiti in the contemporary city is for the most part apolitical. The one exception to this are the insults and anti-Semitic barbs launched at politicians and celebrities, though this category was absent from the images taken. The graffiti offers a good example of the complex nature of the tourist prosaic in urban areas, where the everyday collides with the desire to be away from the stresses of daily life.

6 Photos 5.18T; 8.11T; 9.25T; 12.18T; 15.18T; 18.13T; 18.14T; 19.13T; 20.17T; 20.20T. 7 Photos 12.18T; 17.15T. Signs in the City 81

The Image of the City—Disorder and the Past

The question of graffiti also touches on the image of the city. Dirt and cleanliness were common tropes in the interviews, representative of more general concerns of order and decay. Mary Douglas (2002 [1966]: 4) writes that “some pollutions are used as analogies for expressing a general view of social order.” Many of the comments about the city reveal binary expectations of what would be found in travelling eastward to Budapest. The Hungarian composer György Ligeti quipped that if you travel to Budapest from Paris you think you have arrived in Moscow, but if you travel from Moscow to Budapest you think you have arrived in Paris. The middle space that Hungary occupies geographically and spiritually in Europe, as we have seen above, is not lost on even the most historically uninformed tourist unfamiliar with the anxieties of the Hungarian intelligentsia over the centuries. Thus comments reveal much about what people saw, but also what they were expecting to see.8 For many of those interviewed the city was a remarkable site worthy of a grand European capital. “Architecture, and the restoration of the other side of the Parliament is great; magnificent buildings” (Interview 21) “I had [no expectations] I’m impressed by all the magnificent buildings. Architecture is on a grand scale, grandiose, very impressive” (Interview 23). “Everybody said the architecture is beautiful; there is a lot to see, it’s overwhelming, I can not even get started; very interesting sites, very historical, date back so far” (Interview 50). One man who had just arrived from three days in Paris with his wife said they were interested specifically in the Habsburg empress Erzsébet and remarked on how “very historical … very beautiful” the city was (Interview 45). Another pair commented that they found exactly what they were expecting “a historic city” (Interview 46). For others the city impressed them because it proved to be more wonderful than they had anticipated. “I didn’t expect it to be as nice, I expected it to be poorer” (Interview 26); “I didn’t expect magnificent buildings, a ruin here, a ruin there but nothing like this.” (Interview 31). “It is much more majestic” (Interview 9) “It is better than I expected … very nice buildings, the past of which are interesting” (Interview 11). The city both suffers and benefits from a general lack of knowledge among tourists. Puczkó, Rátz and Smith (2007: 25) note the city has struggled to get out from the association with Vienna and Prague, what they refer to as “the three cities shared history, relatively similar architectural heritage and comparable geographical features.” The rise in “imageless” travel within Europe, made possible by the budget airlines in which destination matters less than price, means that many people are arriving with a weak, or unarticulated, set of expectations. Their research also found that people were generally pleased with the experience of the city, though the comments above reveal that pleasure emerging from having

8 See also the discussion about cleanliness and visitors’ expectation at the Central Market Hall in Chapter 7. 82 Tourists, Signs and the City had a set of diminished expectations countered by the unexpected. One can see this with comments about cleanliness from the interviews. The city was “very immaculate, you don’t see garbage, really well kept” (Interview 24). In several cases it was more a matter that the city was “cleaner” than they had anticipated (Interviews 8, 26 and 48). Within the photo category of infrastructure, there were a relatively large number of pictures taken which dealt with trash and sanitation. In the modern city the appurtenances and practices for disposing of rubbish and waste are extensive. The hygiene and public health movements of the late nineteenth century not only formalized the collection of refuse but also ensured the delivery of clean water and the subsequent removal of waste water. There were several pictures of aestheticized sewer covers. Trash receptacles throughout the contemporary city also play a role in the effort to keep streets tidy. Among the photos which highlight refuse was a picture of a large dumpster on a side street of the Castle District filled with building materials a reminder of the fact that this is not simply a tourist precinct but a lived landscape, a part of the cityscape for those who work and reside here.9 There were also two pictures of the aestheticized wire trashcans found in the Inner City. One of these the photographer had glossed on the location card as being of interest for the “separate compartment for cigarette butts.”10 This was the focus of the picture taken by another photograph of one of the more ubiquitous plastic trash bins found throughout the everyday spaces of the city.11 The reason for the separate cigarette compartment becomes obvious when one notices the numerous remnant piles of melted plastic, indexical signs of the fire that destroyed the plastic trashcan that had been there before. Budapest compared with Vienna or Prague has never been accused of being too clean, but the areas around the main tourist sites are usually kept fairly tidy, often by workers towing large green trashcans with the most improbable looking fairytale brooms made of bound sticks. And while it might seem as if these folksy brooms are there for the tourists’ benefit, they are practical tools found throughout the rest of the city as well. In 2006 miniature motorized street cleaners were introduced with great fanfare to assist in the cleanup of city sidewalks. Nevertheless, however clean it may be at the Parliament or the Castle District, moving through the touristscape there are many ruptures where the cityscape, in all its dinginess appears. One tourist recorded an encounter with the giant trash piles that appear each year through the city on each district’s large item pick up day. The event offers neighbors the opportunity to see into each other’s private lives as long held periodicals and newspapers, furniture and clothing, and everything in between are laid out on the curb. It also provides the possibility for

9 Photo 8.17T. 10 Photos 8.24T; 12.17T. 11 Photo 13.21T. Signs in the City 83 the creative reuse of materials by those who scavenge the discarded items. The one photographed was labeled “pile of furniture” on the location card.12 The other major hygiene challenge within the contemporary city is the management of its canine population and the attendant dog droppings. The city has taken a three-pronged approach to bringing order to this chaos. A number of creative advertising campaigns meant at instilling a societal expectation about cleaning up after walking one’s dog have been waged. The creation of dog runs, either free standing or adjacent to existing parks has been another aspect. The other, as captured in one tourist’s photo, has been the setting up of special boxes, in this case one labeled “dog bog” (in English).13 At the time this research was undertaken, these changes were just getting started and the results were still not showing. Although one interviewee was very impressed by the dogs being walked on their leads and the lack of dog litter (Interview 44) this is more a commentary on her home community than it is the city of Budapest. While these four-legged friends have always been a part of the city population, since the change of regime the rise of the pampered pet has been swift, an indexical sign of the rise in conspicuous consumption, and discretionary spending. One aspect of this, as sociologist Judít Bodnár (2001) points out, has been the rearranging of shelves in small local shops to accommodate a newly introduced western capitalist concept, the can or bag of specially prepared dog food to a society that was used to feeding its animals table scraps. The disappearance of the mutt, replaced by beautifully groomed, purebred dogs has also been a marked change. While many interviewees were impressed by what they saw, others were disappointed. The grandeur of the Habsburg past helps to create a placeworthy experience for the visitor, one of the unfortunate facts is that this cultural heritage was victim to general neglect and the necessities of chronic housing shortages coupled with ideological mandates about the means and manner of building during the socialist period have marked the city in a way that Vienna and Prague were not. As one participant noted, the architectural legacy of being a part of the Austro- Hungarian empire is one marker of Hungarianness but so too is the drabness of the 50s and 60s and the rebuilding in the socialist style that “does not match” and “doesn’t sit well” (Interview 40). The grand façades of nineteenth-century buildings, while part of the Habsburg inheritance, with their crumbling plaster were for many a potent index, in Peirce’s sense of the word, of the socialist era when maintenance of the building stock was notoriously minimalist and the once grand building are one of the distinguishing facts between Vienna and Budapest. The faded glory of crumbling façades were captured in many photographs including separate photos of peeling plaster on the same neo-baroque building at the corner of Fő Street and Batthyányi Square.14

12 Photo 16.15T. 13 Photo 19.23T. 14 Photos 4.23T; 6.24T; 11.13T; 11.14T; 16.25T; 19.21T; 20.16T. 84 Tourists, Signs and the City

Figure 6.2 Drechsler Palace (Photo 19.21T)

As interviewees put it: “It feels like an Eastern European city, the buildings are old not like Western Europe which is modern” (Interview 11); “the buildings are deteriorating, it’s a shame that’s happening” (Interview 30); “it’s appalling outside the main area” (Interview 29). “The buildings, the architecture [are the most striking thing both positive and negative] since they’re run down. The street lighting which is absolutely amazing. The state of buildings in Central Pest, they’re crumbling and derelict … really sad the historically significant buildings are in such terrible shape for example the building across from the Opera House, the guidebooks says it’s a five star hotel and its absolutely derelict” (Interview 19) (see Figure 6.2). The café which filled the arcade of the building, the Drechsler Palace, is featured on the cover of John Lukacs’ (1988) famous work recounting the energy and beauty of the fin-de-siècle city. Sitting as it does across from the grandeur of the Opera House, and along Andrássy Avenue, with its UNESCO World Heritage designation, the decrepit state of the building was that much more noteworthy. This is also the route of what the tourism office has designated as “The Cultural Avenue,” a path that stretches along from the Castle District on the Buda side, across the Chain Bridge and along Andrássy Avenue, up to Heroes’ Square and the museums and offerings of the Városliget [City Park]. The Cultural Avenue concept is an attempt to organize the space of the city, drawing a linear route that offers a comprehensive sampling of the variations in Hungarian culture, history, and tradition as represented by the sites located along it (Puczkó and Rátz 2006). Signs in the City 85

The route concept, as opposed to using tourist precincts affords glimpses into the interstices of the everyday city, but the question that is not addressed is how to deal with all aspects of the city’s past.

The (Post) Socialist City

From the perspective of cities in the Eastern Bloc, what is highlighted in the touristscape is guided by an often hostile if not ambivalent relationship with the period of socialist rule. The “Eastern European”—i.e. “communist”—character of cities in much of the post-socialist world is still evident, with numerous reminders throughout, a legacy both in material form and certain habits and dispositions, and this legacy shapes tourists’ experience in the city. The official website of the Budapest Tourism Office does include brief references to the socialist past, and features both the House of Terror Museum and the Statue Park but these are not highlighted in any meaningful way. The overall theme is one of culture, history and sophistication as opposed to socialist kitsch. “Budapest,” Levente Polyák (2006) writes “searching for its new identity in the nineties, found itself in a peculiar position: official narratives found the city’s past references in the turn-of-the-century liberal metropolis, while at the same time, they tried to phrase Budapest as a dynamic, future-oriented city. This narrative is of course a bold simplification of the transformation, post-socialist Budapest underwent.” The tension between the socialist and pre-socialist past is manifest throughout much of the former Eastern Bloc. One of the best known examples of this is the controversy over the East German built Palace of the Republic, where the debate was about whether the functionalist modern building, cancerous with asbestos should be torn down and a reconstructed Prussian era castle built in its place (Ladd 1997). One sees this struggle playing out in Budapest, for example, in the discussions over the future of the Corvin áruház [Corvin Department Store] at Blaha Lujza square. Built in the 1920s, it was once the largest department store in the city. The neo-classical façade which was damaged in WWII, was given a “modern” facelift in 1966 with a functionalist curtain. In the early 1990s the store still retained the quaint practices of old, wrapping one’s purchases in grey paper and tying the bundle with twine, though in more recent years the store has been superseded by the modern shopping malls that have sprung up throughout the city. The public spaces of the square on which the Corvin sits has been given over to large swathes of the disposed, the losers in the shift to a market economy. In stark contrast, the dangerously dilapidated neo-renaissance building which housed the New York Kávéház, once the most fabulous of all Budapest cafés, has recently been renovated into an exclusive high end hotel complex by an Italian luxury hotel operator, Boscolo, which has also reopened the café. Instead of writers it is now frequented by foreign tourist. The juxtaposition of these two sites, the New York Palace and Corvin Department store within blocks of one another recall the intense class 86 Tourists, Signs and the City divisions of turn of the century Budapest and offers a reminder of the complexities of the contemporary post-socialist city. Sitting atop the Corvin building at a roof- top café seeing the towers of the New York Palace and an industrial smoke stack lit up, Polyak (2007) wrote:

The glittering of fin de siècle nostalgia, the ruin aesthetic of the transforming urban landscape and the ready-made decorative elements of the terrace blend the divergent segments of Central European urban memory in a unique fashion. To this day, an imagined notion of adventure and spontaneity covers these recently still infamous parts of central Pest. This notion provides a perfect breeding- ground for initiatives that connect dilapidation and an acceptable level of urban impoverishment with an enthusiastic irony regarding the remains of socialism, and make use of all these in the symbolic consumer area of entertainment.

There has been talk about stripping away the socialist era curtain and returning the Corvin to its original interwar splendor, presumably filling in the bullet holes at the same time. This would of course have the effect of eradicating the intervening history of the building but is typical of the fetish for “the turn-of-the-century liberal.” One local historian has suggested “pull away the outer façade at certain points as a real curtain but preserve it as part of the building’s history. And by preserving it as a curtain and making visible what is behind, it would be possible to create something original and representative of the palimpsestual stratification of Budapest’s façades” (László Muntean, Personal Communication 2008). It is unlikely that this will happen since the fall of socialism has represented a chance to clean house and exorcise the effects of the planned economy. And while wholesale street renaming and the removal of offending statues and symbols was undertaken across the region (Ladd 1997; Foote, Tóth and Árvay 2000), the economic and social challenges brought about by the demise of single party rule and wide-scale privatization were more complex. These changes resulted in an influx of western capital and cultural influences, diminished social safety nets, increased unemployment, and the emergence of homelessness, a result of the heedless un-regulated embrace of neoliberalism (Andorka et al. 1999; Grime 1999; Bodnár 2000; also see the edited collection of news stories by Berko 2005). All of these have themselves wrought changes to the urban landscape, such as the restoration of façades only and the delineation of public space by class. These signs of the Socialist City in the interviews are only given reference to in a vague idea of “communism” in the landscape. “The infrastructure is communist, it’s not as ornate as Vienna” (Interview 18); “The Architecture is Eastern Bloc type some of it” (Interview 29); “Eastern European feel, tall buildings wide boulevards” (Interview 22); “The architecture—the shapes, colors are left over from communist era and all the baroque stuff and bullets in walls” (Interview 10); “The communist city does intrude, dreadful boring blocs, but it’s not worse than other places” (Interview 33); “A purposely slow, former communist country” (Interview 34); “It was described as Prague 10 years ago, looks tired as a city. It Signs in the City 87 went backwards in the 50s and 60s but has started to pick itself up. A lot of flats and apartments were communist built, not very good” (Interview 40); “What’s left from 50s … rebuilt style does not match. Here’s one [on Szt. István Square] it doesn’t sit well.” (Interview 40). In the photographic record, the Socialist City surprisingly features only minimally. A photographer who ventured out to the Buda hills captured one of the stellar remnants of the Socialist City, the Pioneer mosaic at Széchenyi hegy station.15 During the socialist era, the youth were organized into The Pioneers (Úttörők) and one of its activities was the Pioneer Railway which, along with the nearby Pioneers’ Camp was an entry into the customs and habits of socialist society. As the architect Gábor Preisich said at the time, “Characteristic of a nation’s culture is the fondness with which the authorities and society at large care for the country’s children. Through creating a Pioneers’ Republic, the people’s democracy of Hungary has demonstrated yet another sign of this fondness” (quoted in Prakfalvi 1999: 13). Built between 1947 and 1949 the narrow gage line which ran approximately 12 kilometers through the Buda Hills was operated entirely by children who did the ticket selling, collecting, and signaling, though adults drove the trains. The mosaic at the southern terminus of the line has three main scenes; on the left a train is seen with Pioneers standing in their train uniforms in front. A girl kneels with a dog, holding up a flower which she seems to be trying to identify, based on the open book which sits in front of her. Towards them, in the middle section, a group of Pioneers is marching, with a drum and fife, carrying a red flag and the Hungarian flag with the socialist seal in the middle aloft, and in the far right are a group of Pioneers on an expedition, with their tents set up. In front sit three girls reading, while another girl feeds a fawn, and a boy stands holding a standard with white background and the Hungarian colors on it. It clearly depicts the role that outdoor activity played in the fostering of a healthy socialist youth as well as the emphasis upon industry. It is a stunning example of the ways in which socialist ideology was disseminated in banal ways. Today the line is run by youth interested in trains under the direction of MÁV, Hungarian State Railways, and the Gyermek vasút, or Children’s Railway, as it is now called, has successfully been rehabilitated from its socialist origins so much so that it is a favorite among parents of all political stripes. As the Hungarian language guidebook Vendég Váró (2005: 12–13) puts it, “nor do we have to lose our nostalgia for our childhood. The steam engine again runs, since 2000 it carries travelers to hike the northern Börzsöny side. Newer and newer generations learn about the former Pioneer Railway which today is called the Széchenyi-hegyi Childrens’ Railway …” In the winter they run a steam engine and wagons are warmed by wood burning stoves, while in the summer open-topped cars travel the line and the train can be rented for special occasions such as birthdays and weddings. The stations allow passengers to get off and hike through the numerous

15 Photos 5.5T; 5.6T. 88 Tourists, Signs and the City

Figure 6.3 Trabant marked trails through the forest, including a stop at János hill, the highest point in the area. While the railway is written up in English language guidebooks the full history of it is usually elided. Because it sits outside the touristscape, it tends to draw more adventurous visitors, like the ones who took the pictures. Another object in the photo record which dates from the socialist era and which for many depicted “Hungarianness” was the Trabant (see Figure 6.3).16 The interpretations attached to this auto are emblematic of the way in which banal objects are not simply signs because of their arbitrary symbolic connotations, but because of their real attachment to the social practices of daily life indexically linked to “real existing socialism.” Although car ownership was restricted for most of the socialist period to the nomenklatura, restrictions began to ease in the 1960s and numerous models of so called micro-cars began to fill the streets (see Majtényi 2009 for a history of luxury among Party members). Different brands were manufactured in East Germany, Romania, Poland and Yugoslavia and sold throughout the Eastern Bloc. The Trabant is perhaps the most well known of these but the idea of the micro-car as such has been fully bound up with popular images of the Eastern Bloc. In the 1990s Levi Strauss ran a television ad filmed in Prague in black and white in which we follow a young man driving the streets of the city with a hip soundtrack playing in the background. In the end, the driver

16 Photos 8.10T; 15.23T; 16.21T. Signs in the City 89 gets out of the car pantless, and Westerners were told “In Prague you can trade them for a car.” At the Statue Park, a collection of socialist era statuary and plaques removed from city streets after the change of regime, a light blue Trabant sits just inside the entrance, and miniature die-cast models can be bought at the gift shop along with CDs featuring “The Best of Communism.” The Hammer and Sickle Tour which promised to show you communism “the way it was, comrade” used to offer guests the chance to drive a Trabant (Absolute Walking Tours, n.d.). The car has become a piece of socialist era nostalgia. One of the clothing stores in town which offers graphic t-shirts, mainly to a local clientele, has images of Trabants and Ladas on shirts for infants up through adults. More to the point, however, the Trabant is an example of the way in which the banal becomes a cultural marker for tourists, a potent marker of “Socialist Bloc” and by virtue of its emplacement along the Budapest streets, also a mark of Hungarianness regardless of the car’s East German origin. Only two other photos, both from the Inner City, capture images from the Socialist City, the Soviet War Memorial and a Socialist Realist relief on an unidentified building.17 The Soviet War Memorial is one of the most prominent of the monumental relics of the Socialist City. According to László Prohászka’s (2004) comprehensive survey of statues, the memorial was consecrated on May Day, 1945. In design it is similar to the Soviet War Memorial set up at the same time in nearby Vigadó square in that it features a stone obelisk with gold lettered inscription, above which sits, in gold, the grain sheath, hammer and sickle and a five pointed star of the Soviet Communists. The stone for this monument was allegedly requisitioned from an already planned statue of Martin Luther which was to be set up in Deák Ferenc Square. After the change of regime, many of the offending statues put up by the socialists—the Soviets as well as the Hungarian workers’ party, workers’ councils and other official organs—were removed from city streets, to the Statue Park. This particular monument was not only not removed but “when an underground garage was constructed in the square, the monument was temporarily dismantled and after when the square was put in order, in 2003 it was rebuilt in the original place. The Russian government insisted on the original wording …” with the words in Russian and Hungarian, “Glory to the Liberating Soviet Heroes” [Dicsőség a felszabaditó szovjet hősöknek], (Prohászka 2004: 84). Presently, the monument is surrounded by grass and two rows of metal security fences, creating a sort of no man’s land in the midst of this busy downtown area. Even with the fencing, it is not unusual to see memorial wreaths and flowers laid at the base and at times for those presumably lacking access to the monument, flowers are simply tossed in between the two fences. Adding to the surreal nature of this monument is the fact that it sits in the midst of Szabadság tér, Freedom Square, so named because it was the site of the Neugebäude barracks built by the Habsburgs in the eighteenth century. The

17 Photos 17.9T; 20.15T. 90 Tourists, Signs and the City

Eternal Flame which is located just off the square commemorates the execution here of the first Prime Minister of Hungary, Lajos Batthyány, by Habsburg forces after the failed 1848 uprising. The barracks began to be demolished after the Compromise of 1867 and the square was named in honor of this newly gained freedom. Szabadság Square is also the site of the American Embassy which occupies an outstanding Secessionist building.18 The building displays a bronze plaque commemorating the 15-year internal exile of Cardinal József Míndszenty, who after being released from prison during the 1956 uprising soon sought refuge in the embassy when Soviet tanks re-entered the city. He stayed until he was given leave to travel to the Vatican in 1971. The square is just a stones’ throw from the Parliament and the alignment of the war memorial offers ideal photo opportunities for those interested in capturing the full sweep of recent Hungarian history while from the other direction the American flag and the war memorial offer yet another interesting photo opportunity.19 The paucity of images from the Socialist City among participants’ photographs is quite surprising because the remnants are not difficult to find from bullet holes in older buildings to the housing estates which ring the city. One might argue that these are minuscule and easy to miss on the one hand, and far outside the tourist areas of the Inner City, on the other, but for those moving through these spaces, the socialist past is quite visible in buildings and infrastructure, and street signs along the Grand Boulevard, where the propagandistic names of streets under the former regime have been marked out, with red Xs, but retained on a handful of buildings as a living memorial to the past. Near Parliament, the closest metro stop is in a socialist era building, and one side of St Istvan Square, outside the Basilica is a bland functionalist socialist era building, as was pointed out by one interviewee (40). More subtle signs of the Socialist City are available for those with keen eyes, and sometimes an ability to read Hungarian. Near Parliament on the Danube promenade stands a stone monument to the now-gone Kossuth Bridge which was heroically rebuilt after the fascist onslaught. Across from the City Park a few blocks away from Heroes’ Square is the MEMOSZ Trade Union building discussed in Chapter 4 above. Although it is one of the last important buildings to utilize a modernist idiom, the Socialist

18 The frieze on it was somehow captured by one photographer (Photo 6.20T) which is surprising since the guards which stand outside the embassy are adamant about photographers pointing their cameras in the other direction. 19 The square more recently in the Autumn of 2006 was the site of massive anti- government demonstrations after a leaked tape from a MSZP [Hungarian Socialist Party] convention revealed then Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsány admitting that he “lied” about the state of the economy and that he and his party “screwed up” during their recent term. During the protests, which made international headlines, the Soviet War Memorial was attacked and damaged and the Hungarian State Television Building was stormed (Gorondi 2006). Signs in the City 91

Realist relief on the façade is noteworthy. The Trade Union district of the city was an important statement about the new society being built. The architect of the building Gábor Preisich said “Each period of historical development had the characteristic buildings representing the age. These proclaimed the power of the ruling exploitive class from ancient times to the decline of capitalism. The society progressing towards socialism has created such buildings meant to serve the working man as flats and community centres … as well as those symbols of the fellowship of the working class, those remainders of its decade-long struggle, the trade union headquarters” (quoted in Prakfalvi 1999: 15). And many of the neon signs from the 50s and 60s and even the block letter signs with their generic description of what’s on offer can still be found along the boulevards of the city, the Nagy Korut included, dohány [cigarettes], könyvesbolt [bookstore], and horgászcikkek [fishing supplies]. These prosaic relics sit amongst a city shaped by the Habsburg period and facing an onslaught of new construction and new western capital a fact which makes each of these other eras more conspicuous and the contrast that much more prominent. Mariusz Czepczyński (2008: 125) in his work on the cultural landscapes of Eastern Europe writes: “Empty pedestals and former sites of the monuments … holes left after memorable plates, vast squares and broad avenues designed for grand marches and meetings, silently speak of ‘the recent past.’ The message of these landscapes of silence is only understood by those who still remember … Fewer and fewer people can remember the old, socialist street names, exact locations of the monuments of the sites of former communist party buildings, not even mentioning meanings and texts officially attached to those icons.” While this may be the case, and some would say that even during the socialist era the “socialist street names” were silent as people continued to use the older names colloquially, it is not necessarily the alteration of monuments, government buildings, official sites and former street names which matter as much as it is the material legacy of the everyday spaces of the post-socialist city which still sit heavy on the landscape. But even while the monumental remnants of that past were cleared from the streets, the numerous memorials which have appeared across the city since the change of regime are potent indices of that era, making manifest past events. Memorials are bifocal, pointing not only to the events which they are meant to recall, but as important, if not more so in some cases, pointing to the era in which they were erected. Thus an entire set of monuments and plaques have filled the city streets since 1989 which not surprisingly offer a far more critical reference to socialism than did the hagiographic pieces which were there, often in the same places. Photographs capture some of these including two memorials on the perimeter of the Parliament; the new eternal flame to the victims of 1956, an abstract block of stone, and a more vernacular example, the socialist era flag with a hole cut out with hand lettered signs, flowers and candles that gives it a makeshift feel.20

20 Photo 8.9T. 92 Tourists, Signs and the City

Just across from the Parliament is a new statue of Imre Nagy, the martyred Prime Minister who in 1956 withdrew Hungary from the Warsaw Pact, sparking the revolution. He was killed by the Soviets and buried in an unmarked grave.21 His reburial in 1989 foreshadowed the end of single party rule. Another photographer captured the memorial plaque for Cardinal Míndszenty which sits on the corner of 60 Andrássy Avenue, the former headquarters of the ÁVH State Security Police, now turned into a memorial museum, The House of Terror.22 More surprising is an out of the way example which depicts a wall plaque from Óbuda which translates as “Memorial to the Óbudai Civilian Victims deported to the Soviet Union in January 1945.”23 But of course at the time this research was undertaken, Hungary had been free of the yoke of “real existing socialism” for 17 years, nearly two decades during which the economic and political changes of the shift from a planned economy and single party rule have made their mark upon the post-socialist urban landscape. Many of these post-socialist states have, in the mean time, also become members of the European Union. While the EU prides itself on protecting difference, the bureaucratic juggernaut of EU mandates means that much local, everyday culture, is actually jeopardized by requirements to conform. States which were romanced by western money and rushed headlong into the arms of the EU have also witnessed a resurgence in hardline populist sentiment and a perceived need for defending and fostering national cultures which are viewed within the context of internationalism and supranationalism as minority cultures under threat by outside influences. The accession to the European Union both by those in the country and those coming from abroad has been seen as a marker, a sign, of Hungary’s return to the west. Although not yet part of the Eurozone it has recently joined the Schengen agreement, it is on its way towards full membership in the club of Europe. As one interviewee put it Budapest was “an oppressed city beginning to come up with the European Union, signs of Westernization” (Interview 40) while for another, the most striking thing was “The flying of the EU flag alongside the national flag, in other locations not just government buildings, it struck me that membership in the EU is a significant matter, and one Hungarian I asked certainly lent credibility to this” (Interview 24). The data from European Union public opinion polling complicate this picture somewhat. In 1990, 79 percent of Hungarians were in favor of an Association Treaty, the first step towards accession (Eurobarometer 34: Table 64). By 2004 as a new member state, only 45 percent saw membership as being a good thing for Hungary (Eurobarometer 61: Fig. 6.1a). The most recent Eurobarometer from Autumn 2008 showed Hungary’s citizens even more pessimistic with only 31 percent responding that membership in the EU is a good thing (Eurobarometer

21 Photo 8.8T. 22 Photo 12.14T. 23 Photo 18.18T. Signs in the City 93

70: 15). In a 1999 poll, Hungary’s entrance into NATO was seen by 48 percent of respondents as a sign of Hungary’s place within the West (Wodak and Kovács 2004). And while only 10 percent of respondents said Hungary’s roots lie in the East, almost a third, 31 percent, took a middle position that Hungary was neither east nor west (Wodak and Kovács 2004). In 1990, emerging from the shadow of the Soviet Union, a majority of Hungarian citizens, 66 percent, said they thought of themselves as European at least sometimes (Eurobarometer 34: 50), but by 2004, with membership in the EU secured, the numbers were reversed and a majority, 61 percent, thought of themselves as only Hungarian (Eurobarometer 61: C48). Hungarians continue to be circumspect about what it means to be a part of the perceived west in a unified Europe. In Spring 2008 the majority of respondents, 52 percent, said that the country had not benefited from membership, this compared with 77 percent of Poles and 76 percent of Slovaks and Estonians who agreed that their membership had benefited their countries (Eurobarometer 69: 17–18). For visitors to the city, Hungary offers this mixed bag, a country in the midst of Europe yet unique and apart. A paradox and aporia this in-between-ness is perhaps embodied in the site of Nyugati pályaudvar.24 Built in the 1870s by the Eiffel company, and today housing the “world’s most beautiful McDonalds,” the Western Train station is the place from where the trains head out east to Transylvania. Of course these facts are not there apparent on the façade of the structure waiting to be read, the site must be interpreted with the collateral knowledge that is gained from other places. This is what makes interpretation of the built environment so challenging for the tourist and why the general feel of place in urban tourism, produced by the tourist highlights embedded in the spaces of the everyday city is what seems to matter.

Set in Stone—Architecture and History in the Cityscape

Tourists travel for a number of reasons though history and culture are dominate tropes and play a key role in urban tourism. The vast majority of interviewees who when asked what things they liked to see mentioned historical and cultural features more than any other. “Site seeing, churches, castles, landmarks, cafés, historical museums …” (Interview 1). “The main sites, historic sites, sometimes museums …” (Interview 21). Specific cultural sites mentioned included museums and churches but architecture was a dominant theme.

24 Photo 20.4T. 94 Tourists, Signs and the City

Figure 6.4 Museum and School of Applied Arts (Iparművészeti Múzeum) (Photo 20.21T)

To paraphrase David Lowenthal (1985), a foreign country is the past and this is what we see in the photographic record of buildings taken by participants. When asked how the city matched their expectations one American pair answered that they found “exactly what they expected, a historical city” (Interview 46). Along with monuments and particular historical sites, architecture is an important marker of creating the sense of a “historic” city. In interviews architecture was the most commonly mentioned sign of Hungarianess. Those taking photographs captured infrastructure and other elements of the contemporary city, but when they turned their lens to architecture the images they took were almost exclusively from the turn of the nineteenth century Habsburg City. The present appears not in images of post-1989 buildings, but in images of renovation of the old. The city needless to say is full of buildings, and a key element of the tourist prosaic is the general composite of the façades. Architecture as the largest category of images includes entire buildings as well as smaller details such as friezes and windows. Pictures of buildings from the Habsburg period, especially those which have suffered little or have been extensively restored predominate. The colored tiles, the product of the Zsolnay factory which we have discussed in Chapter 4, were photographed on the roofs of the Technical University [Budapesti Műszaki Egyetem] along the Danube, and Signs in the City 95

Figure 6.5 Typical Central European Courtyard (Photo 4.2T) the Museum of Applied Arts [Ipariművészeti Múzeum] (see Figure 6.4).25 There were pictures of eyelid dormers in the Castle District, and pictures of the interior structural elements of the Central Market Hall.26 Exterior shots of its façade and that of the Market Hall at Batthyányi square were also taken.27 There were also numerous pictures of balconies, including shadowy interior courtyards with balcony galleries, “ornate plasterwork balconies,” one with “very great restoration needed” and one “little balcony with flowers.”28 The balcony, especially of the type depicted in the pictures of interior courtyards, are images typical of this region. Moravánszky (2002: 410) writes, “the characteristic Central European apartment … blocks usually have one or more gateways leading from the street into a courtyard with open galleries. Staircases at the gateways give access to these galleries. The small vestibules, kitchens and baths (if any) or toilets of the flats were oriented toward the gallery, the living rooms and bedrooms toward the street.” He goes on to note the social implications of such construction writing that “some German theoreticians who described the open staircase principle stressed the drawback that each tenant had to live under the constant visual control of the others; however other analysts regarded this

25 Photos 4.12T; 22.21T. 26 Photos 1.20T; 8.23T; 6.9T; 8.3T; 20.25T. 27 Photos 20.22T; 15.19T. 28 Photos 6.5T; 11.5T; 11.16T; 4.2T; 4.3T; 6.16T; 4.6T; 4.7T; 1.18T; 19.15T. 96 Tourists, Signs and the City

Figure 6.6 University of Fine Arts Building, 67 Andrássy Avenue (Photo 6.11T) situation as generating social cohesion” but of course these are two sides of the same coin. While in other parts of Central Europe the courtyard block type was considered rental housing, and hence home to the less affluent, in Budapest this was the prevailing type even among the bourgeoisie, so that on the gallery side of the flat, along with the utilitarian rooms, would be situated a very small servant’s room. As we have seen Andrássy Avenue played a key role in the shape the city took in the late nineteenth century and there are several pictures of buildings along this route. They include the Opera House, and its poor cousin across the way, the derelict building of the former Drechsler Palace. Further down the road the badly exfoliating edifice at the corner of Liszt Ferenc Square with its permanent wood scaffolding was also photographed.29 While there are several buildings along the route which have sgraffitoed30 façades the former Drawing School is perhaps in the best shape and was photographed. Also along Andrássy, the towers of one of the four curved buildings at Kodaly Körönd [Circle] and an iron fence and façade near the terminus at the City Park were taken.

29 Photos 11.13T; 11.14T; 16.25T; 19.21T; 20.16T. 30 Sgraffito is a technique in which the top layer of paint, glaze or plaster is scratched away to reveal a contrasting layer underneath. Signs in the City 97

Buildings along the Little Boulevard out from Deák Square were also photographed. A 1901 building by an unknown architect for an Italian salami merchant which features paintings of the allegory of the seasons and the ponderous Anker Insurance Building on the square both appear.31 Interestingly there were no pictures taken of the Great Synagogue which also is along this route. The topic of Jewish Budapest was generally ignored in interviews and by photographers, which is emblematic of the general dissolve between Jewish history in Budapest and Hungarian history among those visiting the city. In the collection of images there are virtually no examples of Secessionist, the Finish embassy being the only exception, or Hungarian modernist buildings from the interwar period.32 We have already discussed the few images from the socialist period, but it is worth noting again that there are no examples of Socialist Realist architecture not to mention the ubiquitous panel flats. And as only one contemporary building was taken, the image painted of the city is skewed towards the turn of the nineteenth century. While the vast majority of buildings photographed come from the period prior to WWI, it would be difficult to write the architectural history of the Habsburg era from this sample, not to say anything of bringing that history up to the current day. The fact that there are missing many of the buildings which are considered to be important examples of the period is not at all surprising. While the camera was an attempt to free the participant from having to explain and allow them to show instead what they were seeing and interpreting, it appears that even this avenue did not afford more than a vague referencing of building styles. Just as interviewees frequently mentioned the architecture but failed to mention any specifics about this category of analysis, the photographs also record only a general picture of the state of architecture and the various styles present in the city. The humanistic geographer Yi-Fu Tuan (1977), in Space and Place, has argued that architecture was much more important and transparent in terms of meaning in preliterate societies in the pre-modern world, revealing information about social structure and power dynamics. Architecture was more obviously didactic, the Medieval Cathedral being one example. With the emergence of a literate society, and the preeminence of the written word in the modern world, however, architecture no longer carries such unambiguous lessons. Architecture he contends has been lessoned of the burden of needing to convey messages, and hence the meaning of architecture has becomes less clear and less important. The argument may be too strained since as we have seen, particularly for nationally important buildings, the various styles available in the nineteenth century, still mattered and conveyed different sets of meanings and the debates about what form contemporary buildings in the capital should take are not rare. Buildings remain potent signs and it is clear that architecture does matter in the contemporary world. If that were not the case there would be no need for architects, and both

31 Photos 21.1T; 20.6T. 32 Photo 6.3T. 98 Tourists, Signs and the City

Figure 6.7 Pest Embankment (Photo 20.19T) those interviewed and those taking pictures would not have focused so much on buildings. It is worth mentioning too that in observations of tourists, it was rare that anyone actually stopped and looked at any particular buildings, nor did they tend to look above the ground level. The minute differences in meaning and style, especially among the various historicizing movements as written about by architectural historians is really the currency of a specialized discipline, as foreign to the everyday person as the complex calculus of astrophysicists. But the fact that the neo-renaissance, neo- baroque, and neo-classical styles differ from what is generally in evidence in contemporary buildings (hence the singular image of contemporary construction, the exuberantly post-modern ING building across from the City Park can be accounted for by the general perception that glass and steel construction is more international than located in any particular national cultural home), is meaningful, at the very least as a general sign of “pastness.”33 There was little discussion about particular buildings other than the Parliament, the derelict Drechsler Palace across from the Opera house (which was also photographed), and the Basilica with its uncomely socialist era neighbor which sits on the square with it. The photo in Figure 6.7 taken by one participant is illustrative of the way in which architecture functions. Taken across from the opposite shore, it is a photo of the Pest embankment between Erzsébet and Szabadság Bridges. The Danube fills

33 Photo 21.20T. Signs in the City 99 most of the foreground on the bottom half of the picture and the blue sky fills the rest. But between them is a ribbon of façades, each different than the next. None of them particularly stand out, but together they providing a sense of groundedness and a place to focus the eye if only briefly. The question of what specific ideas about architecture were relevant for the tourist experience of Hungarianess is difficult to answer other than to say that that the various architectural styles simply contributed to a “architexturality” proving a rough surface on which to stick a sense of place and history.

Quotidian Objects of the Contemporary City

The signage of the city is one subset of the larger category of urban infrastructure. These banal aspects of the city appear in the interviews as well as the photos; items such as street lights, post boxes and buses appear as relevant category of artifacts. Urban tourism engenders a number of contradictions that are not present at purpose-built tourist sites, namely the fact that cities are not simply objects of the tourist gaze, but are home to hundreds of thousands if not millions of people. Thus all the activities that take place on a daily basis, from work to play, from shopping to eating, require the infrastructure needed to handle those activities: roads, cars, taxis, public transportation and street signs, sewers, toilets, and rubbish bins, bakeries, bars, cafés, restaurants and grocers, offices, shops, malls, parks, benches, and street lamps. In spite of fears of homogenization from the ongoing phenomenon of globalization, the infrastructure that makes urban living possible, while evincing enough similarity to make movement through a strange city possible, also embodies distinct morphological differences between places, and these variations are meaningful because of the geographic and locational differences across space and amongst nations. For tourists, these objects were perceived as a part of the tourist prosaic appearing just dissimilar enough that when asked specifically to record Hungarianess, these elements stood out. Streets and street furniture were the highlights of many pictures, including clocks, an iron fence and cobblestones.34 Pictures of the historicized green telephone boxes were taken, the same one in the Castle District by two different photographers, as well as the highly stylized box from the Párizsi Arcade whose bright pink graffiti matches perfectly the new pink T-mobile receiver.35 The mail boxes of Magyar Posta were well represented in the photographs.36 Budapest is a city of water and especially in the Inner City area there are numerous fountains, many providing drinking water. Photographers captured the elaborate fountain

34 Photos 4.4T; 5.16T; 6.13T; 18.25T. 35 Photos 13.19T; 18.23T; 21.9T; 12.19T. 36 Photos 8.13T; 10.17T; 12.8T; 13.25T; 16.14T; 18.21T; 18.22T. 100 Tourists, Signs and the City

Figure 6.8 Traffic Signs (Photo 18.6T) Signs in the City 101 outside of the Hotel Gellért, the simple stone fountain just off Váci Street and the girl with amphora in the Castle District.37 We have seen that street signs were photographed but there were also pictures of iconographic traffic tablets. The meaning of the tablet depicted in Figure 6.8 was explained thus “the arrow means that this is a one-way street. The other four signs belong together and mean that you may stop but you cannot wait/park your car from where the sign is up to 15 meters because it is an area where things/goods are taken in and out of cars/lorries between 7am and 6pm during the day. So this is to ensure that the place is left free for loading. You can park your car there only if you stay there and can move on as soon as the space is needed” [Ivett Császár 2010, Personal Communication]. Also among the elements that make the city work is the public transportation system. Photos of the yellow line, which was built in the 1890s and still retains the dimensions and style of its fin-de-siècle origins were taken as well as pictures from the other two lines which were built after the war, some of the stations rivaling the depth of the Moscow subway. Photographers took pictures of one of the escalators on the red or blue lines which Török (2005) claims offers some of the best people viewing, as well as a piece of public art from the station wall and a metro car.38 The system was the setting of one of the more popular recent Hungarian movies, Kontroll [Control] (which was filmed entirely in the underground) based upon the adventures of a group of controllers, ticket inspectors who ensure that passengers are travelling with proper tickets or passes, as there are no gates such as in Chicago or New York. Tourists are a prime target for the controllers who engage in applied semiotics, interpreting who is an outsider and hence unfamiliar with the somewhat Byzantine fare structure for tickets, while those who appear to be locals, especially the elderly and parents with children are not even checked. This is not just harassment of the tourist however but is grounded in the belief that they, either out of ignorance or intent, often take advantage of a ticket system which is based upon social norms and expectations inherent to Hungarian society. The urban transportation network is also filled with streetcars, buses and trolley buses. The bright yellow streetcars are a distinctive feature of the city, and both the cars themselves and the signs were taken.39 One tourist snapped a picture of one of the red trolley buses which run on wires strung across the streets.40 Antal Szerb in his 1930s Guide to Budapest for Martians [Budapesti Kalauz Marslakók számára] wrote that the objects of the city are imbued with complex meanings so even “the autobus numbers have literary associations, or some such thing.” He was not far from wrong. The trolley bus was first introduced in 1948, the year of Stalin’s 70th birthday and hence each route was numbered sequentially through the 70s.

37 Photos 12.24T; 4.0T; 14.8T. 38 Photos 22.25T; 20.8T; 20.9T. 39 Photos 4.21T; 18.15T; 19.25T; 20.21T; 5.15T. 40 Photo 19.22. 102 Tourists, Signs and the City

The cafés, a dominant feature in the Budapest landscape figured in tourists’ encounters with the city. “I travel to sit in a restaurant, buy a coffee, eat a cake and talk to people” said one man (Interview 3). For others, it was specifically the notion of the café found throughout the former Habsburg lands, but most notably linked with “Vienna and Budapest coffee houses” (Interview 28) which mattered. The role that café culture played in Budapest in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was enormous. Translating the social historian Gábor Gyáni (1999: 85–6):

Accordingly, the coffeehouse became—in particular in the 19th century and the first few decades of the 20th—a truly civic institution first and foremost because the term coffeehouse itself acquired connotations expressive of (almost a seal of) the lifestyle, consumer culture and sociability of the bourgeoisie, even while the patrons themselves increasingly hailed from the strata beneath the bourgeoisie or the circles of the intelligentsia, forced into the narrow confines of petty bourgeois relations.

While many cafés have opened, or remade themselves since the change of regime, especially in the tourist areas of Váci Street and the trendy Liszt Ferenc Square, and the more local and trendier Ráday Street, the more traditional café and cukrászdá [confectionary] are major tourist attractions. The Vendég Váró instructs Hungarian speaking visitors to the city that “for after lunch coffee, it is worth moving to the newly old conjured Central Coffeehouse, where [Frigyes] Karinthy, [Mihály] Babits and many other spirits hang around the marble tables and Thonet chairs” (40). The cafés, numbering 600 in 1900 according to John Lukacs (1988: 148), the chronicler of fin-de-siècle Budapest, were the epicenters of cultural life. He writes:

They were inexpensive. One could sit for hours over a cup of coffee, with a glass of cold water frequently replenished by a boy-waiter, and avail oneself of a variety of local and foreign newspapers and journals hanging on bamboo racks. One could send or receive messages and letters from the coffeehouse. Free paper, pen and ink were available there … Many writers and journalists found the atmosphere of their Budapest coffeehouse so congenial that they repaired there for work, rather than for relaxation (or at least for a combination of both.) Entire newspaper articles, at times entire short stories, chapters of a novel and a large part of the theater criticism were composed at the tables of the noisy, crowded coffeehouses of Budapest (151).

In many of the cafés during the summer months tables could be moved outside. Café culture in the Habsburg style lasted until World War II, and in the aftermath during the socialist period the presszó [coffee bar] was the place to be, especially Signs in the City 103 after the 1956 revolution, with the neon signs and eclectic interiors (see Bodor 1992 for a nostalgic tour of these places). There were of course a few holdouts that survived from the pre-war period, or have come back to life, and are prime spots for visitors to recapture the Habsburg experience, including the Central Kávéház, Lukács, Művész and Gerbeaud. A number of photos taken by participants depict themselves or their travel mates experiencing café culture. These include a shot of an espresso and glass of water on a marble top table, and a slice of chocolate cake from the famous but given over to the tourist, Gerbeaud with an uncharacteristic glass of orange juice and iced tea on a marble top table.41 These shots capture the Central European café culture and are not just symbols of this past, but iconic in a Peircean sense. The two images are also telling of the way in which tourists experience culture. Minca and Oaks (2006) refer to the paradox of the tourist endeavor, which can also be explained with Peirce’s theory of the quest for the dynamical object, the one that exists in reality outside the realm of the touristscape. On the one hand there is the fact of the espresso, which is a quintessential part of the Central European café experience. So too are the marble table tops and the cake it can be argued is also reminiscent of the café as an ideal. The historicist nature of the present day Gerbeaud fits nicely into the idea as well. And yet there is also the present day reality, that now one can easily find iced tea and orange juice among the more exotic offerings at cafés, and that many of them have a modern slick euro style (see for example the description of the Café Europa in Drakulić 1996). Of course the question of the “authentic,” could be raised but Peirce would argue that all of these moments in the history of the café make up the dynamical object and thus authenticity is a moot point allowing for the flexible accounting of what a Hungarian café experience is today at this point in time; the images of these tourists should sit side-by-side with the images of café culture from the turn of the nineteenth century. The historical and the contemporary, and the dialectic between them, is one of the attractions of touring the European city. It is also a hallmark of the tourist prosaic. The cityscape as we have noted is the pulse of the city where the work and life of locals plays out. One of the hallmarks of the contemporary city is that it is in flux, attested to by the numerous pictures of construction and the juxtaposition of old buildings against the new (see Figure 6.9).42 While there has been some reconstruction undertaken by government funds, often at the district level, the majority of renovation has come from private investment resulting in an inconsistency that can produce stark contrasts between the old and shiny and old and decrepit as captured in these photographs. And of course there were numerous composite pictures of basic everyday street scenes,

41 Photos 8.7T; 4.16T. 42 Photos 1.16T; 4.11T; 4.14T; 5.24T; 8.6T; 10.22T; 15.15T; 17.18T. 104 Tourists, Signs and the City

Figure 6.9 Uneven Restoration (Photo 16.25T) Signs in the City 105 with people, buildings, infrastructure, signs and history either obvious or hidden as in the case of the numbering of the trolley buses.43 The intersection between the touristscape and the cityscape in the tourist prosaic is most obvious in the mix between the everyday and the exceptional. This was reflected in interviews where tourists frequently commented upon the coming together of these two realms in shaping their experiences. When asked about preconceptions, one woman answered that she was expecting “Something like this, grand palaces, churches, little cobbled streets, and more modern parts, a contrast” (Interview 51). But perhaps the most cogent articulation of the tourist prosaic was captured in this assessment of the differences between Prague and Budapest: “In Prague you know how Prague is really cleaned up, its spottier here, the tourist area is not as distinct, you’re in with real people more than in Prague” (Interview 43). It is this interaction between the banal and the monumental that is what gives urban tourism its caché.

Placing Culture—The Indexical Role of Locality

Peirce’s ideas of the indexical role which proximity and space play are key to understanding the ways in which the accretion of meaning builds on top of the functional nature of objects in the landscape. A close reading of Peirce’s examples of indices, signs that simply “point” to their objects, highlights a neglected spatial element in his thoughts on signification—the fact that the locational and proximal conditions give meaning to the index, allowing it to function as such. So, for example, in Bergman’s (2002: 9) discussion of the role common sense plays in Peirce’s theory, he writes, “some wild interpretations, which the signs alone would render possible, are excluded by common sense. Much is based on an unspecified understanding of things shared by communicants” (emphasis added). He then cites the following passage from Peirce:

If the utterer says ‘Fine day!’ he does not dream of any possibility of the interpreter’s thinking of any mere desire for a fine day that a Finn of the North Cape might have entertained on April 19, 1776. He means, of course, to refer to the actual weather, then and there, where he and the interpreter are alike influenced by the fine weather, and have it near the surface of their common consciousness (EP 2:407; emphasis added).

This “unspecified understanding” is entirely dependent upon the “then and there” the fact that both utterer and interpreter are located proximate to each other in the same locale. Peirce’s other illustrative examples for the indexical nature of demonstratives also underscore the significance of location and proximity.

43 Photos 1.17T; 2.10T; 2.21T; 4.8T; 5.12T; 5.14T; 13.16T; 16.22T; 18.3T; 19.18T; 20.23T. 106 Tourists, Signs and the City

Suppose two men meet upon a country road and one of them says to the other, “The chimney of that house is on fire.” The other looks around him and describes a house with green blinds and a verandah having a smoking chimney. He walks on a few miles and meets a second traveler. Like a Simple Simon he says, “The chimney of that house is on fire.” “What house?” asks the other. “Oh, a house with green blinds and a verandah” replies the simpleton. “Where is the house?” asks the stranger. He desires some index which connects his apprehension with the house meant. Words alone cannot do this. The demonstrative pronouns “this” and “that” are indices. For they call upon the hearer to use his powers of observation and so establish a real connection with his mind and the object … (EP 2.14; see also EP 2.7). Demonstratives are dependent upon spatiality, hence the difference between here and there, this and that. We can extend this to say that emplacement/location works indexically to give signification to national culture and objects in the built environment. Because we live in a world of national states—which have become as natural and unreflected upon as the air we breathe—where the uniqueness of nationalities is taken for granted, even the most universally homogenizing objects can be marked as nationally significant both by insiders who make claims to exceptionalism, and by outsiders, the tourists, who ascribe each difference encountered from their own cultural milieu to the fact of being in another, as the example glossed by one photographer on his location card indicates, “hand in street sign—not seen anywhere else.” Looking through Wanderlust, (Litten 2004) a collection of photographs of quotidian objects encountered during travel, despite the fact that they carry no captions, these are easily attributed to their nation of encounter by those in the know. On the page of subway train interiors, the other three trains are elsewhere, but the mint green and chrome interior of the Budapest subway immediately jumps out at those familiar with Budapest, as does the red post box which, lacking words, nevertheless stands out amongst the other examples as clearly Hungarian. And on the page of traffic signs, the stick man with the hat holding the little stick girl’s hand is the “Hungarian example” as it differs slightly but significantly from the other similar tablets. Lajos Csordás (1997) wrote in his Népszabadság article entitled “The Stickfigure eats a hamburger: About what do the Budapest pictograms say?” even these most cross-national of icons reveal a great deal about the national cultures in which they originate and in which they function. “[T]hey can not mean the same thing, arising from one people’s distinct mentality, they have to be a little divergent, even if it [the idea] is from a common principle” (66). The signs, in their form and type, while attempting to be universal are upon closer scrutiny culturally specific. Csordás continues, “[o]n the Viennese subway, the signs are smaller because the Viennese people travel 30% slower than the residents in Pest … the sign [in Budapest] which informs the residents of the capital that dogs must be picked up on the escalator is mostly about us. In other places most likely even without this sign they know this. Thus it turns out, that a pictogram becomes a Signs in the City 107 characteristic Budapest phenomenon” (66). One of many of the difficulties faced by the reunification of East and West Berlin was the controversy over the icon on the crosswalks used in East Berlin and the homogenizing, deculturating threat posed by the stripped down figures in the West. And if the pictogram can be “culturated,” we can see the path down which other mundane objects from buildings to bridges can be as well. Such is the case, as we have seen for example with the Chain Bridge. Although designed by a Scotsman and built by an Englishman it has nevertheless become an iconic image of the city of Budapest. Thus we can say that European capital cities illustrate a paradox of national culture. While it is clear that certain objects are intended to be “national,” statues of indigenous heroes, monuments commemorating historically significant events and toponymics which all have deliberate mnemonic meanings, there is an entire other layer of meaning making that is attached to more mundane objects based upon their roles within the cultural, social and political history of the state, and upon their simple geographic locale, though these are often mutually dependent. In the case of Budapest, what has come to be seen as “Hungarian” by those coming to the city, is really representative of the complex interaction between place and the indigenous and foreign influences which have been reshaping Hungarian culture since the time of the conversion to Christianity by Szent István, or as he is known outside of Hungary, Saint Stephen. What one finds in the interviews and photos taken by tourists is that besides the language, there is little that the visitor encounters that could be considered “really, uniquely Hungarian,” except for the fact that each neo-classical building, each bloc flat, each yellow tram encountered, is imbued with Hungarianness by virtue of its emplacement within the Hungarian capital and within the historical trajectory of events transpiring in place. Thus geography and location conspire as powerful indices of cultural identity, contributing to place signification for visitors even for foreign objects such as the East German Trabant. And perhaps we could simply chalk up these cultural mis-understandings to the fact that tourists often have but a limited view of the cultures in which they sojourn and could be forgiven for reading a neo-classical apartment on the most grand boulevard of the city or the street sign with a pointing finger as uniquely “Hungarian” objects. But the photographs taken by Hungarian locals (Metro- Roland 2009a) who were also asked to capture Hungarianness in the prosaic sites of the city resulted in pictures of many of the same things—neoclassical and eclectic buildings; window boxes and balconies; graffiti; renovated and crumbling apartments; shops and shadowy courtyards; the entry way to the Millennial Yellow line underground station and streetcars; the Párizsi Arcade; Andrássy Avenue; the sgraffitoed façade of the University of Fine Arts Building at 67 Andrássy; and the Liszt statue. Thus returning to the indexical nature of geography and location, we can see that these exert a powerful influence upon the meaning making which ensues when we travel to place. In answering the question of how Hungarian is Budapest the answer is tautological, it is a Hungarian city because it is filled with Hungarian 108 Tourists, Signs and the City things, but these things have become Hungarian by virtue of their emplacement, their embeddedness in the urban and cultural geography of the city. There are two important conclusions to be drawn from the results of interviews with tourists and their photographs. While those given cameras were asked specifically to focus upon the everyday city, as noted above, the subjects of their photos hew quite closely to the comments made by interviewees in that their experience of culture within the city is a record of the tourist prosaic grounded in the ensemble of elements, from street signs and general architectural details of buildings in the urban landscape rather than the specific experience with any one site. If Budapest were Paris we could say that while the Eiffel Tower and Notre Dame Cathedral help give the city its characteristic identity, they are not what makes Paris Paris, but rather it is the ensemble of cafés and boulangeries, the Seine and the chestnuts in blossom which contribute to the mise-en-scène which tourists seek. In other words, in urban tourism—and this seems also to be the case in other settings as well (Rickly-Boyd and Metro-Roland 2010)—the whole is greater than any one part, but the parts are significant to constituting the whole. Thus while the highlights and the idea of a city, so-called branding, contribute to the pre-trip decision making about where to travel, once on the ground it is the elements of the tourist prosaic that mix of the cityscape and touristscape which appear to most contribute to place signification and the experience of having been to a destination. Secondly it is clear that the emplaced nature of these mundane objects in the cityscape–touristscape nexus is indexical, drawing the connection between the culture of a place and culture in place. Phone boxes, street signs, buses, the design of buildings, and markets are all encountered within a cultural milieu that gives them a patina of identity, in this case Hungarian. But there is a limit in that objects must be free to be interpreted as Hungarian, that is, they must not have any other cultural codes already attached. So the numerous McDonalds which fill the Budapest cityscape with their golden arches are already culturally marked so to speak and thus when one did show up in the photographic record the Hungarian aspect was glossed as “new signs on old buildings.”44 As the Hungarian Academy of Sciences building or the Parliament, draw heavily upon non-Hungarian elements in their design, their emplacement within the physical and cultural geography of the nation transform them into examples of Hungarianness. But just as a pointing index finger, the indexical nature of emplacement does not say anything about the actual history or origins of objects—such as the East German Trabant. In order to approach a fuller understanding of the object, the dynamical object of Peirce’s theory, collateral knowledge must build up the layers of meaning to move interpretation closer towards its finale. As there are multiple stopping points along the interpretive road, we can see that for many tourists emplacement is the starting and stopping point and objects are Hungarian by virtue of their geographic location. This of course is the link between tourism and

44 Photo 1.8T. Signs in the City 109 geography, the place making of geographic imagination and the reason for travel, to see other places/times. For the local resident, the same object, the sgraffito decorated façade of the former Drawing School building along Andrássy Avenue, for example, the interpretation of its Hungarianness may start with its emplacement but it is not the end point as their understanding of the intricacies of Hungarian history and culture are brought to bear. Geographic location is simply one aspect in the cognitive flow of interpretation, but it is nevertheless an important one, and one which is preeminent in the spaces of the tourist prosaic.