Picturing Buda Castle

April 29, 2009 by · No comments

Velina Vateva

Budapest was built of three different cities, says Tamas Pinter, who worked in the Buda Castle for nine years. There was the old Buda, which was a Roman settlement, Buda with the castle and the royal palace, and Pest, on the other side of Danube. Buda is not the oldest, because the Roman part is the oldest one.

However, Buda Castle holds another kind of significance, which goes beyond time measurements. It contained the royal residence and the coronation church. This underscores the significance of the Castle, which tells the story not so much of how great aristocracy once was, but far more about the ways people then lived.

Tamas Pinter shows us Buda through his camera’s lenses and through his hand-drawn art. “For me the drawings are more important. I just wanted to give an idea of the objectivity of the camera and my subjective view by my pencil”, he says.

There were many battles for Budapest; the last was in the Second World War. After the war, when the Buda district was in ruins, architects decided to restore the historic architecture. Therefore, the present state of the building is a kind of mix between the historic and the replicated.

A city, after all, is always changing. But, as in many other places, interest in preserving history waxes and wanes, and consistent attention to Buda Castle is perhaps not as great as would be ideal.

Although the cultural life there is not what it used to be, still there is great vitality in the Castle district. Maybe one of the reasons for this is that outside the Castle nowadays there are other centers that draw lively activity. Efficient tourism management could do great things for the Castle, says Tamas Pinter.