Every Statue Tells a Story - Public Monuments in Budapest

Összefoglaló

This book aims to introduce readers to the public sculpture of Budapest by providing information about who or what the various statues and monuments represent, about their sculptors and about the works themselves -- style, location, history, removal, return, etc. The aim is also to stimulate an interest in and critical appreciation of the sculptural environment of the city, so that readers themselves will begin to ask questions about the statues they see -- who or what is this, when was it erected, and why here? Finally, the aim is to demystify public sculpture -- you might say to bring it down from its pedestal -- and encourage both a critical and a playful attitude to statues and their meanings.

Bob Dent is a British writer, researcher and editor. His interest in statues, and why they are there, stems from his many years spent in Liverpool, a city with a large number of public monuments. Bob Dent has lived in Budapest since 1986 and has written extensively about Hungary’s history, politics, economy and culture for a variety of British and local publications. He has reported on Hungary for a number of radio stations and has acted as a research consultant for TV crews filming in the country. He currently works as a copy editor of translations, researcher, writer and occasional tour guide. Every Statue Tells A Story is his seventh book about Hungary and his fifth about Budapest, which -- like Liverpool -- is a city whose history has been written in bronze and stone.

In November 2008 the Budapest Municipality awarded Bob Dent a ‘Budapestért’ (For Budapest) Prize in recognition of his writings -- with their “interesting and unique approach” -- about the culture and history of Hungary and in particular Budapest.

In this new work Bob Dent casts a critical and often humorous eye at Budapest’s many statues and public monuments, all of which, in their own different ways, speak volumes about Hungary’s history and culture.

From the Author’s Preface …
The raising of a statue also raises many other questions. Who commissioned the work, when and why? Who created it? What kind of person was the sculptor? How long did it take for the statue to actually appear? What is the monument trying to tell us about the person or people represented? What does it tell us about the period of history when it was planned and created? How can there be a variety of statues of the same person which look quite different? Are there any oddities about a statue -- perhaps about the accompanying text or the side figures? Why is it standing where it is? Does it suit its surroundings? What happened on the day of its official inauguration and what else was happening around the same time? Has the statue ever become a focus for some other event and if so why? Has it always stood in the same location? Has it ever ‘disappeared’, perhaps later to ‘reappear’ in the same or another location? Did it look the same when it came back, or has it changed? Has it changed without even being removed? Not all of these questions relate to every statue, whether in Budapest or elsewhere, but a number of them, in different combinations, can certainly be applied to all monuments.

A work which treats the whole of Budapest as one big statue park!