Cemeteries

Budapest’s most offbeat sight is Kerepesi Cemetery, its Highgate or Pìre Lachaise, on VIII Fiumei út near Keleti train station. Built over a century ago, it is the final resting place of Hungary’s wealthiest and most prominent men and women. The evocative sculptured monuments scattered among the trees give the place a unique, almost classical air. The most notable personages built themselves huge mausoleums, which now stand alongside memorials to Communists of yesteryear - many of them now minus their red stars. Half the streets in Hungary are named after people buried here.

Plot 21 contains the graves of many who died in the 1956 uprising. Near the huge mausoleum for party honchos, which is topped with the words ‘I lived for Communism, for the people’, is the simple grave of János Kádár who died in 1989. Further back are the 19^th century mausoleums, including that of Ferenc Deák (1803-76), the politician who engineered the 1867 Austro-Hungarian `compromise’.

In 1989 Imre Nagy (1896-1958), the man most closely associated with the 1956 uprising, was reburied in Új köztemető, Budapest’s huge ‘new municipal cemetery’ on the far Eastern side of town (District X). Access to the Municipal Cemetery from Kerepesi is fairly easy. As you leave Kerepesi, turn left on Fiumei út and walk south-east along the cemetery wall to the next tram stop (not the one near the entrance). Take tram No 28 south-east to the end of the line right at Új köztemető’s gate. When you want to return to town, take bus No 95 from the cemetery gate direct to Keleti train station or bus No 68 south-west to the Kőbánya-Kispest metro.

Nagy and many other prominent figures from 1956, plus approximately 2000 people liquidated between 1945 and I 956, lie in plots (parcelák) 300 and 301 in the far north-east of the cemetery, a 30-minute walk from the entrance. The Communists used this site to dump the bodies of executed ‘traitors’ in mass graves precisely because it was so remote. A map of the Új köztemető stands near the gate and the way is clearly signposted. At peak periods you can take a microbus marked ‘temető járat’ around the cemetery or hire a taxi at the gate.

Farkasrét Cemetery XI. Németvölgyi 99 by tram 59 from Moszkva square or by bus 8, 8A, 53. It is open from 7am-9pm on Mon-Fri, and 9am-5pm on Saturdays and Sundays. Here you will find the most outstanding works of Imre Makovecz - the mortuary chapel (1975), which is pretty much in constant use. In the cemetery itself you will find the grave of Béla Bartók.