I first visited Budapest in the summer of 1991, travelling up from Belgrade to take a short break from the increasingly fraught atmosphere amid the gathering storm of war in former Yugoslavia. Hungary had only recently freed itself from the yoke of Soviet rule, and there were still Soviet soldiers in the city. Like many visitors, I was impressed by the grandeur of Budapest, by the splendid views along the Danube of the parliament building, the Chain Bridge and Buda castle stretched along the hill overlooking the river. I feasted on rich, spicey Hungarian food, and tipped the obligatory Romany musicians. Over the years I visited Budapest several more times. I spent over a week there in 1993, visiting the Yugoslav (Serbia and Montenegro) embassy on Heroes Square every day in a forlorn attempt to acquire a visa to go to Serbia. I went mushrooming with a friend’s family in the Buda hills, north of the city, and stayed in an ethnic-Slovak village, enjoying the local specialities of goat’s cheese and yoghurt. I visited the Serbian Orthodox churches and the art galleries in Szentendre, north of Budapest.
Spending nearly two months in Budapest in the spring of 2022, I searched out the city’s Ottoman heritage. The city’s separate parts, Buda and Pest, were united only in the 19th century. Buda, overlooking the Danube on the western side of the river, had been the medieval capital of Hungary before the cataclysmic defeat at the hands of the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent at Mohács in 1526, and the capture of Buda itself in 1541. The Ottomans held sway in Hungary for not quite 150 years before they were expelled by the Hapsburgs at the end of the 17th century. Their influence was shallower than in the Balkan lands to the south, where Ottoman rule lasted for several centuries. Most of Hungary’s population remained Christian, although many left and sought refuge in territory still under Christian rule. But as in the Balkans, towns became largely Muslim bastions surrounded by predominantly Christian inhabited countryside. So it was with Buda, where in the 16th and 17th centuries the view across the Danube was dominated by minarets, and the splendid Matthias church was converted into a mosque.
Not a lot remains of Ottoman Buda. But remnants can be found, notably in some fine Ottoman-era baths. Communal baths were important centres of urban Ottoman life. Architecturally beautiful, they were not just places for keeping clean, but for social gathering, where people could catch up with friends, with news, and with business. Buda is blessed with hot thermal springs that had first attracted the Romans to the area a millennium and a half before, when they built the city of Aquincum. After the Romans, Christian Europe largely lost the habit of cleanliness and of regular bathing. But the Ottomans revived the custom in the lands they conquered, and took full advantage of the hot springs in Buda.
I visited the Rudas baths one evening. Enclosed within a more modern building, nothing can be seen of the Ottoman building from the street. But inside it felt like I was entering a bygone world. The baths were built not long after the Ottoman conquest, and were rebuilt and used by the governor of Buda Vilayet, Sokollu Mustafa Pasha. The octagonal bath is surrounded by eight pillars supporting a cupola with small openings through which shine shafts of light. Around the central bath, in the corners of the room, are smaller baths with different water temperatures. Men wandered around (I went on a men-only day), many of them wearing skimpy loin cloths. They sat in the baths, relaxing, contemplating, chatting in soft tones, against the background of the gentle tinkling of falling water. It was all very relaxing. I could not know how it would have been in the bygone days of Ottoman Buda. No doubt there were customs, etiquette from that era which would have been unfamiliar to us today. But somehow I felt that the essence of the baths, as a place of rest, relaxation and social intercourse, was probably not so different. If the experience was not quite of a time warp, I had perhaps caught some inkling of a past age.
Another of the Ottoman-era baths, the Király baths, tucked behind the foreign ministry, was closed to the public when I was there, but, unlike the Rudas baths, the low, stone building, with its green domes, can be seen from the street. The modern city has been built around it, leaving it a little forlorn and out of place, deprived of the context of the city it once inhabited. Yet its discreet presence reminds of the world that was once here.
Another such reminder, renovated with Turkish funds, is the Gül Baba türbe, or tomb, a steep walk up the hill overlooking the Margaret Bridge, not far from the Király baths. Gül Baba was a Bektashi dervish who died either during the Ottoman conquest of Buda, or shortly after it. He was declared the Wali, or patron saint of the city, and Suleiman the Magnificent was said to have been one of the coffin bearers at his funeral. The tomb became a place of Muslim pilgrimage, but after the reconquest of Buda by the Hapsburgs it was converted into a Christian chapel. Perhaps that is why it was one of the few buildings of Ottoman Buda to survive. By the late 19th century the building was in private hands, and was again accessible to Muslim pilgrims. The Ottoman government commissioned the restoration of the tomb, which was completed in 1914. Today the property of the Turkish state, the most recent renovation was completed in 2018, and the site was opened by the Hungarian prime minister and the Turkish president, a marker of the close ties between the two countries and their like-minded leaders. Like other such tombs in the Balkans, it is a simple, but elegant little building, nowadays shaded by trees and surrounded by rose gardens. Gül Baba was known as the “father of roses”.
While the visible legacy of Ottoman rule in central Europe may be slight, Hungarians acknowledge other enduring influences apart from the handful of buildings in Budapest and elsewhere. These include borrowings from the Turkish language, as well as dishes such as stuffed cabbage leaves and paprika, a key ingredient of Hungarian cuisine. It was also through the Ottomans that coffee was introduced to central Europe. For Christian Europeans of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the Sultan’s armies reached the gates of Vienna, the Ottomans represented an existential threat. Recovering Buda and the lands of central Europe at the end of the seventeenth century must have been a profound relief. Yet when we consider the legacy of the Ottomans, not only their aggressive expansionism, but also the fine architecture and the beautiful baths of Budapest, it is hard not to concede the rich contribution they made to European civilisation.
No comments:
Post a Comment