Visiting the Hungarian Parliament [antikvár]

"The House of the Motherland" "The motherland does not have a house." Thus wrote bitterly Mihály Vörösmarty, one of the greatest poets of the Hungárián heroic age of bourgeois civilization, in 1846. Indeed, through the hundreds of years when the grandsons of the conquering chieftain Árpád ruled the country the diet didn't have a regular house. But there was no need for it, as they - the prelates, the barons, the nobles and the burghers - were "the country". Where they walked, judged, debated - there was the "motherland". Since the time of St. Stephen, Hungary's legendary founder, the greatest turn of the wheel in Hungárián history occurred in Vörösmarty's generation - the Age of Reform and the Revolution of 1848, which followed it. Spurred by economic need, social unrest and the flowering of culture, the thousands of the privileged in society and the millions in the lower classes coalesced into a historical community, the Hungárián nation. And this nation, now being consciously förmed by the great men of the age - István Széchenyi, Miklós Wesselényi, Ferenc Deák, Lajos Kossuth, Ferenc Kölcsey, Sándor Petőfi -, was very much in need of a physical home. As a counterweight to the royal palace rising high on Buda Hill, the Fest side of the Danube was chosen to symbolize that Hungary's destiny lay with popular democracy and not with royal whim.