Memento Park

Memento Park is a 45-minute bus ride from the city centre, and the journey is part of the experience — you pass through suburban Budapest and arrive at what looks like a film set, a semicircular open-air space surrounded by a brick wall and filled with oversized socialist realist sculpture. The effect is somewhere between absurd and genuinely imposing. These statues were designed to overwhelm, and they still do.

The park includes an exhibition barrack with films about the communist secret police and how the statues were removed after 1989. There is also a replica of Stalin's boots — the only part left after protesters tore down his statue during the 1956 uprising. Take the direct bus from Deák Ferenc tér; check the park's website for current schedules as it runs seasonally.

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A story
When communism collapsed in 1989, Budapest faced the question every post-Soviet city faced: what to do with the giant propaganda statues? Most cities destroyed theirs. Budapest gathered 42 of them — including a massive Lenin, a striding pair of Soviet and Hungarian workers, and a Red Army soldier — and put them in an outdoor museum on the southwestern edge of the city, where they stand today in carefully arranged gravel beds.