The Cave Hospital at Buda
The cave hospital, the most interesting and most horrifying healthcare institution in Hungary's history, opened its doors for Museum Night.
Click on the picture for the full gallery  © Stiller Ákos |
Now, on Museum Night, the institution has awoken from its 60-year slumber. The cave system can be reached via a narrow staircase off Szentharomsag ter, from where a corridor leads to the hospital. The installation below evokes the atmosphere of the time to spine-chilling effect. There is an evocation of Christmas 1944, an operating theatre that is more reminiscent of a torture changer, there are wax models that stare back at you with tortured expressions and piles of bloodied clothes - and everywhere a 15 degree chill. The cliff-face hospital is not recommended for claustrophobes, nor for those of a nervous disposition.
Reloaded
Scapegoats and traitors, 64 counties, Arpad flags. We are the losers of history. Tears and anger. The Trianon commemorations at the weekend would have proceeded as normal if the Fidesz MP Zsolt Nemeth hadn't stolen the show from the specialist Trianon revisionists.
Albert Takács
"I was always a good student," says the 52-year-old freshly appointed minister, a constitutional lawyer by training.
Foundations in the firing line
Hvg.hu has learned that Janos Zuschlag, executive chairman of the Socialist Party in Bacs-Kiskun county, is being prosecuted for fraud. Prosecutors say "Janos Z." is suspected along with seven co-defendants of using various foundations and associations to make fraudulent grant applications, resulting in Ft50m disappearing into their pockets. Zuschlag's former private secretary is also under suspicion.
Politics and the security services
Security experts believe the National Security Office (NBH) could end up sharing the police forces' fate.
Book of the ex-cultural minister
Love him or hate him, like or dislike what he did as Minister for Culture, but there was no denying it that he was a scholar with outstanding powers of analysis. When he joined the Gyurcsany government, I can hardly have been the only one who dared to hope that he might serve as an intellectual Trojan Horse among all the politicians and party bureaucrats. But he, too, turned into a politician, seeming to lose his powers of self-criticism as he settled into his gilded ministerial chair.
