All cities are invisible cities. The reader will remember the premiss of Italo Calvino’s book of that title, in which Marco Polo regales Genghis Khan with tales of the imagined cities he has visited. These are fantastical places, beyond human comprehension but not out of reach of the imagination. All cities are fantastical in this respect because their histories transcend the experience of any single generation. They are invisible for the same reason: constructed, covered over, sacked, covered over, bombed, covered over. Time and again they are effaced, then drawn up again. Villages turn into towns, towns into suburbs, suburbs into expanded city centres. Then everything goes and has to start again. There are wild swings of fortune involving wars, plagues, betrayals, intrigue, earthquakes, crop failures, famines and explosions in gunpowder magazines. The citizens fall prey to prophetic visions such as lions in the streets, blood seeping from statues, or the invasion of strange birds, snakes, scorpions and toads. Events pass into one or other form of narrative: history, myth, aspiration, grudge. Simply thinking of these narratives involves the making of vast notional lists, endless inventories of people and goods. Once you try to imagine the people, their invisibility becomes acutely painful and you cannot help but look fearfully at your fellow human beings as inhabitants of some invisible city.
The popular historian is both valuable and terrifying. He has to move so fast we cannot help but become aware of the vast torrent of unremarkable lost lives sweeping by under us, unnoticed and unremarked. Look, there goes a crowd of them, he says, and they have gone before we can even begin to focus them. Compared to the continent, the earth, the universe, they are nothing but a speck of dust flying from nowhere to nowhere, but if you stand where our historian does the dust storm must seem formidable, perhaps even blinding. Etcetera is history’s other name, as Péter Esterházy said in The Glance of the Countess Hahn-Hahn. We are blinded, etcetera.
The invasion of the birds comes from an eyewitness quoted by Géza Buzinkay. This witness saw them as auguries of a new battle in 1686, the successful storming of Buda—then in the hands of Abdurrahman Pasha’s ten thousand Turkish troops—by the allied forces of Christendom. “On that day came thousands upon thousands of peculiar birds cheeping in an ominous manner... for a day and a half all rivers, all springs, even the Danube stream, were stricken with snakes and scorpions, and whenever a person went to draw water, his jug would be filled with snakes and scorpions that looked like small, red insects…” Then follow the lists: Buzinkay gives us the forty-five thousand strong allied Christian army with its “186 cannons and mortars, 560 thousand kilograms of gunpowder and 300 thousand kilograms of fuse, 25 thousand kilograms of lead… the armies of the Holy Roman Emperor, Bavaria and Saxony,” who are joined by “considerable Prussian, Franconian and Swabian forces, in addition to 15 thousand Hungarian soldiers, hussar cavalry, and Haiduks, Italian, English, French and Spanish mercenaries”, along with “an indescribable number of boats and galleys”. The numbers game defeats us, as it did the Turks on that occasion, and reminds us also how far the notion of an insular Hungary diverges from reality.
Being in the middle of Europe means being a crossing place for Celts, Romans, Huns, Avars, Pechenegs, Magyars, Tartars, Turks, Austrians, Germans and Russians, each in due season. Each group leaves
behind some residue of its presence, as do the other communities who have settled and flourished on the banks of the Danube. Here be Serbs, Bosnians, Swabians, Slavs, Romanians, Jews, people dwelling within and without the city walls, all or most employing the Magyar tongue. Today these are supplemented by many others, including Americans, English, Chinese and Japanese. And so this endless process goes on, the nations passing through like water through a colander, running away and leaving some solid matter behind: a church, a synagogue, a tomb, some baths, a hotel, a café, some architectural trick or device, a word or two, no to mention the names: Tatár, Lengyel, Horváth, Moldován, Svábi, Szerb, Tóth, Török, Németh, Román, Oláh, Orosz. History’s etceteras. Buzinkay’s history of Budapest could be read as a series of footnotes to the city’s genetic narrative.
Capital cities are the inevitable focal point of this process. Of course, the point is often, and rightly, made (Buzinkay himself makes it in his introduction) that the capital is not to be confused for the country or the nation as a whole. Paris is not France, London is not England. Nevertheless, these cities act as filters, voices, figureheads. The capital is, after all, the head of the body and it is through the head the voice emerges in response to the needs of the body. That, at least, is the theory: that is where the analogy goes. The centre of the nervous system is located in the head, and when you take an aerial view and see the roads and railway lines converging on the capital, the sheer physical force of the metaphor comes vividly alive. This is not even to mention that which is less visible on the surface: cables, wires and pipelines, still less the invisibles. Trade, directives, thoughts. People. Invisible cities.

There are endless anecdotes, incidents and coincidences. It is rather wonderful to know that the academy of literature in Valencia announced a poetry competition to celebrate the occasion of the Christian liberation of Buda, that Casanova might have stayed at the still surviving White Cross inn in Batthyány Square and added to his list of conquests there, or that another Venetian, Mazzucato, set up a silk-winding factory that still stands in Miklós Square, Pest. Half the pleasure is in being able to visualize the location of events
precisely at this or that street corner. Buzinkay realizes this and is happy to populate his historical street map with both vanished and surviving landmarks. In fact, as far as the illustrations of this very handsome book go, it might have been even better with even more maps.
However, if we are short of maps, we are certainly not short of faces. One double spread gives us portraits of the major city officials and leaders of Buda, Pest and Budapest from the early eighteenth century onwards. And it is in the eighteenth century that the expansion of Budapest begins. From only 34,000 counting all municipalities in the 1770s (London’s population was 860,000 at the time), the populace climbed to 50,000 within ten to fifteen years. In 1793 the naturalist, von Hoffmannsegg, thought Pest might in time rival Berlin. Development was rapid. First the Catholic religious orders were dissolved, and the Protestant and Orthodox churches rose. Jews returned in numbers. The various districts of Pest received their names: Leopoldstown, Francistown, Theresatown. A new market site was decided upon. Hungarian nationalism took root and Hungarian language newspapers began to appear. This went hand in hand with the development of café society, the literary café. Magnificent balls were held, theatres were built. Pest forged ahead of more conservative Buda as a social and financial centre. And so life progressed to 1795 and the execution of the leaders of the Hungarian Jacobins. But though political repression followed, the modernization of Budapest continued, busy as ever. When, in 1806, Napoleon imposed a ban of trade with England, the importance of the Danube as a trade route was vastly increased, and this instigated a boom which resulted in a frantic spell of building. The National Museum rose, founded on the basis of Count Ferenc Széchényi’s gift of his library. Pest was illuminated, if fitfully, by new oil lamps for its dark streets. The Ludovika military academy was established. By 1810, Géza Buzinkay tells us, the population of Pest, Buda and Óbuda reached 88,000. Twenty years later it was 130,000. The combined city was becoming less German and more Hungarian in its culture, while, at the same time, becoming more international, “a centre for all [nationalities and religions] in the eastern part of Europe.” Even the tragic flood of 1838, which covered Pest for three days and killed some hundred and fifty people, failed to slow its growth. The building that followed the flood set the pattern for present Inner City Pest with its restrained neo-Classicism. And so we could go on, through the building of the Chain Bridge, the revolution of 1848, and the increasing sense of readiness for independence that was centred on Pest. Buzinkay gives a brief and lively sketch of the events of 15 March, 1848, the day the revolution broke out, and traces the main landmarks of the revolution itself over a single chapter, always keeping his eye on the effects this had on the physical fabric of the city.
And so he traces his story to the present day, to 1996 at least, the 1100th anniversary of the founding of the Hungarian state, through reconciliation, unification of the three cities into Budapest in 1873, the rapid expansion that followed, the bourgeois flowering of 1896, the disasters of our own century, and the rise and fall of various state structures, each of which stages might take the reviewer several paragraphs to summarize.
The point is that Buzinkay is in full control of his material. Whenever the story might be tempted to lurch into one direction, to follow this or that aspect of history, he returns the reader to the subject, which is, after all, a single city. A single city made out of three. Understanding this history should be a process of humanization. It should perhaps make its citizens more generous with each other and with the tides of people that pass through and settle. The city’s strengths—resilience, vivacity, openness, innovation—have developed out of its vulnerability. Without the vulnerability the city would have been bright and jewel-like, with a touch of evanescence. With it, it has developed a heroic and tragic power. If Buzinkay’s book moves a little too fast to convey that power, it is only because he has a lot to get through and because the invisible city is bound, almost by definition, to slip through the historian’s fingers. But the citizens know it. It is all around them: they have only to look.

George Szirtes’s
Selected Poems 1976–1996 was published by Oxford University Press in 1996.
His latest collection, Portrait of My Father in an English Landscape, was published
also by OUP in 1998.