Looking across the Danube through sheets of rain at the creamy façade and dark dome of Budapest’s Parliament, I shake my head in amazement. I did not expect to be in Budapest this week, sitting before my room’s picture window in the Castle Hilton, a glorious hotel carved into the rock where two monasteries once clung to the Buda Hills. In fact, during the last two years I often wondered if I would ever get back here or any of the places that had become normal while working many days a year for Smithsonian Journeys.
Budapest is the third city on a route I adore called Old World Europe. Its itinerary begins in Warsaw, moves to Krakow, then Budapest, Vienna, and finally Prague. People often choose this route for Prague and Vienna, only to find themselves in love with Krakow and Budapest—and for very good reasons.
Budapest is a serious place. A city with ancient roots (and plenty of Roman foundations), her infrastructure is increasingly new and her historical buildings thoughtfully renovated. The streets are clean and feel safe. The education is topnotch. Residents are sharply dressed, clearly valuing a professional look. Of course, like most cities in Europe, museums and cultural centers are everywhere, delightful cafes line the sidewalks, and the air is filled with a sense that life, to be lived to its fullest, is best treasured in the company of others.
These are some of the reasons that led Sir Roger Scruton, the recently deceased and much-mourned author, philosopher, and political activist, to make Budapest one of his intellectual homes. Scruton (1944-2020) had a long history of working with dissidents and facilitating free expression of ideas, especially in Eastern Europe. In Budapest he found an artistically rich, intellectually vibrant culture rooted in tradition (including religious faith), and he embraced it. Hungarians, in return, embraced his writings. (Most of his books have been translated into Hungarian, a language not for sissies!)
But to find cafes erected in his honor? This I never expected. Yet on Wednesday when I met up with an American colleague who works as a researcher in the Mathias Corvinus Collegium, she took me to a place for lunch called “Scruton.” I thought the sign was a joke until I stepped across the doorway. Before me was a sleekly decorated, spacious cafe, one of three Scruton Cafes in Budapest. Each is filled with books from Scruton’s massive library and lined with photos and personal items donated by his widow Sophie, including things representing his life as an equestrian.
Scruton Cafes offer far more than décor, cappuccino, and delicious food. They offer crisp professional space for everything from professional podcasting facilities and areas for intimate staged events like debates, to private nooks where folks can tuck themselves to study and write at length. One Scruton Cafe lies near the Parliament, imbued with government buzz and electric political talk, especially these days. We had gone to the newest of the three, close to the Elizabeth Bridge. More such cafes are planned.
To be honest, it took me the first half of our three-hour lunch to get past the realization that Scruton’s own sets of reference works and series of Great Book stood behind, across, and above me. Meanwhile, my ears were wide open listening to my colleague fill me in on subjects varying from her work at the Collegium to the Hungarian response to the Ukrainian-Russian war.
Budapest is one of those places a person might visit and decide to plant a new life, much as Paris was in the 1830s or 1920s. Right now, everyone is ultra-glad to see tourists coming back. Tourism fuels the economies of places like Budapest, and its disappearance through the virus shutdown left many people destitute. Over the eleven years I’ve worked in this industry, several remarkable guides have become friends. Beautifully educated, multi-lingual, tireless in their energy, they are among the thousands of people world-wide devastated by the disappearance of tourists. One friend described how guides in her country were ineligible for assistance or stays of payments because the “right to guide tours” was never officially shut down: there simply was no one to guide and no place to take them!
Slowly, the industry is rebounding. Clearly the conflict in Ukraine has added a new burden for people in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, and any land perceived to be near to the war. My group on this tour is smaller than normal, but everyone seems passionately dedicated to being here. My participation came about when the designated professor had to drop out. An email asking me to jump in “beeped” on my phone eight days ago, just as we had started to drive to the Great Homeschool Conference in Cincinnati days ago. I wrote back “I cannot come yet.” They wrote, “Come when you can.” I wrote back, “You betcha!” And so, with Hank willing to take up the slack, and dear friends in Columbus bringing me sweaters and turtlenecks, I flew out Sunday and met the group Monday evening in Budapest as it arrived from a bus ride across the Carpathian Mountains.
So life goes at times. Astonishing surprises can be around the corner. Along with my delight to be back at work, I am still absorbing the experience of sitting at “Scruton” feeling nearly a wave of white light emanating from the place. Books and journals were everywhere. Gems of quotations from Scruton were framed along the walls. Someone was setting up speakers for a musical presentation that night. Someone else was editing a manuscript. Others had their heads bent over books. The plates were beautiful, the stemware elegant, and the food beautifully presented and priced below what you would have expected.
An agenda of upcoming events stood on the table in Hungarian, so the best I could do was spot some top-notch authors and gaze with envy at my friend who, since arriving here, has made superb progress with Hungarian. I will say this: awakened by the realization of what Budapest meant to Scruton and, more importantly, what Scruton’s dedicated, risky work meant (and still means) to people who long dwelt behind the Iron Curtain, I will never view his books on my shelves in the same way.
