The main attraction of Memento Park is the Szoborpark, or Statue Park, where the remaining statues reflecting Socialist cultural politics and ideology now call home.
After some consideration, in 1993 the statues were relocated to their current location based on the conceptual proposal of a “statue park” by Ákos Eleőd Jr. His plan, which included exhibition halls, auditoriums and other cultural, educational and touristic facilities, started off slowly and it was only in 2006, for the 50th anniversary of the 1956 revolution, that his concept begin to take shape with the addition of Stalin’s Grandstand as well as the two exhibition barracks.
The gargantuan statues that make up the Szoborpark are from the Communist era between 1947 and 1989. They are displayed for all to see to give visitors a true feeling of what it was like when they were casting shadows on the streets of the city.
The allegorical monuments symbolize “Hungarian-Soviet Friendship” and “Liberation,” and include icons from the labor movement as well as soldiers from the Red Army. Walking around the park, you can see the representations of famous personalities like Lenin, Marx, Engels, Dimitrov, Ostapenko, Béla Kun and other “heroes” of the communist world.
One of the favorites of the park is the 6-meter-tall statue of the Liberation Army Soldier. The evil-eyed Soviet soldier that once stood on the top of Gellért Hill is holding a hammer-and-sickle flag in his hand and has a pistol hanging around his neck.
Another memorable figure that shouldn’t be missed is the first public statue of Lenin that was erected in Budapest in 1958 as a gift from the city council of Moscow. It only lasted 10 years until damage meant that the statue had to be secretly recast and replaced by the Csepel iron factory workers. In 1989, when the statue was under threat of being torn down, workers from the iron plant hid it in the cellar of their factory. The factory was later turned into a marzipan warehouse and the dusty statue of Lenin was resurrected from amid the treats and relocated to Statue Park.
Ákos Eleőd had a strategic vision in his design of the park. He purposely chose the 12-meter-high façade and architectural components of a monumental classicist building as an introduction into the nature of dictatorship. Segregated from the rest of Memento Park by two brick walls, the open-air Statue Park forces visitors around the circuit of statues and then back out the same way they came in. The façade of Statue Park is emblazoned with the poem One Sentence on Tyranny by Gyula Illyés from 1950.
