Articulating Identity through the Technological

Rearticulation of Space: The Hungarian

Millennial Exhibition as World's Fair and
the Disordering of Fin-de-Siecle Budapest

Dorothy Barenscott

Looking out across the Danube River in 1894, from one side of Budapest
to the other, one would have been greeted with the clamor, busde, and
din of a metropolis under accelerated construction. With just two years
remaining until the eyes of the world would come to momentarily focus
on the featured site of Hungary's 1896 Millennial Exhibition, there was
an energy in the air that concentrated squarely on the eastern banks of
the glistening river. Here the urban core of a modernizing Pest was under-
going profound and rapid transformation. Closest to the riverbank and in
prominent view of the traditional seat of power, the ancient Buda Castle
recently renovated to become the Habsburg Royal Palace, the exoskel-
eton of Hungary's new Parliament building was rapidly taking shape. With
its pointed turrets, steep roofs, and massive dome, the structure stretched
into the open sky, asserting its oversized and spectacular monumental-
ity as a kind of challenge and theatrical gesture both to the inhabitants
of the city and to the larger Austro-Hungarian empire. At just under
100 meters, Hungary's Parliament building would become the tallest free-
standing building in Budapest and would be among the most ambitious
building projects in the city's history. But not far from this site, another
equally important project was quickly taking form. This time, however, the
architecture was not bound for the sky but dug beneath the eardi's sur-
face into the subterranean realm of the urban core. Fashioned into mo-
bile pathways for what would become the city's technological showpiece,
the new underground railway and its noisy construction had resulted in
the temporary uprooting of Budapest's most beautiful and significant
street, Andrassy Avenue—a thoroughfare that would lead visitors directly
to the official fairgrounds of the planned exhibition in the city's largest
public park. To gain access to the latest mode of modern transport, city
inhabitants were willing to put up with the short-term inconvenience of
dust, pollution, and ugly vistas. Both the new Parliament building and the
underground railway promised mutual reconfiguration—for a modern-
izing Budapest and Hungarian state as well as for those who participated
patiently in its conceptual and spatial expansion.
Not unlike the phantasmagoric reflection of the Hungarian Parlia-
ment in the waters of the Danube, displacing, if only through an illusion,
the size and importance of the Habsburg Royal Palace on the western side
of the river, the Hungarian government's decision to plan and execute a
national exhibition on the size and scale of an international world's fair
was seen by many within Budapest as a unique opportunity to rival Vienna
as center of the Austro-Hungarian empire. The exhibition, while provid-
Slavic Review 69, no. 3 (Fall 2010)
 Slavic Review

ing a chance to bring the citizens of Budapest together in a display of

unification, solidarity, and modern progress, also celebrated the arrival of
the burgeoning and fastest growing metropolis in fin-de-siecle Europe. 1
The planning process for the event had originated modesdy enough with
an 1891 proposal by the Budapest General Assembly to erect a monu-
ment to celebrate the thousand-year anniversary of the conquest of Hun-
gary and the settlement of the Carpathian Basin by the ancient nomadic
Magyars, modern Hungarians' mythic ancestors. And while some minor
controversy emerged in connection with pinpointing the exact date of
this conquest, the year 896 was chosen to accommodate already existing
construction projects slated for completion by the mid 1890s.2 Notable
among these was an entire range of private and public buildings and key
infrastructure that would quickly become associated with emerging and
more ambitious plans to stage a Millennial Exhibidon commemoradng
Hungarian history and celebrating new fin-de-siecle technologies re-
lated to modern industrialization, transportation, and communication.
As Hungarian historian Andras Gero suggests in his account of the ear-
liest planning stages of the 1896 exhibition, the attempt to fabricate a
solid temporal and spatial dimension of origin for the Hungarian people
paralleled attempts to consecrate and form such a dimension within the
national psyche: "The Millennial celebration was not just an occasion for
revelry; it was an historic opportunity for the Hungarian government to
construct an integrated national and historical ideology depicting the de
facto imperfect state as dejure a whole, inspiring a sense of continuity, of
permanent and unshakeable stability, while at the same time presenting
the status quo as inevitable."3 With the stakes so high, it is perhaps not sur-
prising that the event in its final form as a "millennial" exhibition would
conflate die national interests of long-standing Hungarian statehood
with die desire for international attention to be focused on Hungary's
most cosmopolitan and multicultural city. In this sense, the positioning of
Budapest as a world-class metropolis ready for inclusion into the global

1. Budapest's claim to be the fastest growing city in the immediate years around the
turn of the twentieth century is reiterated in contemporary accounts in the foreign press.
It is also largely supported through official statistics in Thomas Hall, Planning Europe's
Capital Cities: Aspects ofNineteenth-Century Urban Development (London, 1997), 264. Between
1800 and 1900, Budapest saw a staggering 1,255 percent increase in its population, out-
pacing Berlin, Brussels, Athens, Helsinki, and Vienna, among others. Only Christiania
(modern-day Oslo) saw a greater increase in the same period. Hall points out the difficulty
of capturing these statistics, since the expanding official boundaries of some cities affected
population figures. Nevertheless, Budapest's claim to be outpacing other large European
cities of the same period, is substantiated by Thomas Bender and Carl Schorske, eds.,
Budapest and New York: Studies in Metropolitan Transformation, 1870-1930 (New York, 1994),
2 - 4 , 30-36; and Karoly Voros, "Birth of Budapest: Building a Metropolis, 1873-1918,"
in Andras Gero and Janos Poor, eds., Budapest: A History from Its Beginnings to 1998, trans.
JuditZinner (Boulder, Colo., 1997), 103.
2. Andras Gero, Modern Hungarian Society in the Making: The Unfinished Experience,
trans. James Patterson and Eniko Koncz (Budapest, 1995), 204. The Hungarian govern-
ment called upon the Academy of Sciences in 1882 to agree upon a period of time in
which the conquest likely occurred. A twelve-year window between 888 and 900 AD was
established, and a government statute set the millennium for 1896.
3. Ibid.
The Hungarian Millennial Exhibition andFin-de-Siecle Budapest 573

economy clouded the status of the event as a Hungarian, a multinational,

or an international fair.4
Among the challenges facing exhibition planners was Budapest's
quick ascendancy in the Austro-Hungarian empire, which led to its status
as second imperial capital by 1891 under the dual monarchy system. This
situation, which permitted Hungary a degree of self-government with its
own independent parliament and the power to enact laws for the lands
of the Hungarian Crown, had led to breakneck urban transformation in
a matter of a few short decades. The pressing need to establish a sense of
rightful authority for the emerging metropolis and its inhabitants resulted
in an increasingly complicated political situation for Hungary, one that
became entangled in an odd juxtaposition of representing an ancient past
while simultaneously portraying modern political relations. Of particular
concern for the Hungarian government was the dilemma of finding the
appropriate visual and spatial vocabulary to represent national concerns
while differentiating Hungarian and foreign commercial interests and po-
litical authority from its often tenuous dual partnership with the Austrian
Habsburgs.

To explore this nexus of concerns, I will examine a constellation of

interconnected building projects within the urban fabric of Budapest for
which the 1896 Millennial Exhibition played a guiding role: the construc-
tion and refinement of Andrassy Avenue, 1874-1896; the Hungarian
Parliament building, 1885-1904; and Budapest's subway, 1891-1896. In
addition, threaded through the analysis is the argument concerning the
powerful role that modern cities have played in the social imaginary of
nation and empire, suggesting how Hungary's identity as imperial partner
with Austria was increasingly tied to the multisensory (visual, corporeal,
intellectual) experience of, and participation in, the growth of Budapest
as the empire's second capital. Budapest was thus a city literally invent-
ing, and promoting, simultaneous with the ambiguities of modern urban
development and expansion, what it would mean to be "Hungarian" to
an international as well as a regional public. The venue of a world's fair,
whether successfully achieved or not, provided the perfect vehicle to fur-
ther this goal.

4. Hungary's Millennial Exhibition is deliberately referred to throughout this article

as an exhibition and not a world's fair in order to examine the complexity of perception
around the urban event as it unfolded in Budapest. In the international press, the exhi-
bition was described interchangeably as all of these (a national exhibition, a millennial
exhibition, and a world's fair) and understood by the local and international public of the
time as something more than a localized exhibition. But I have found conflicting accounts
concerning whether the official sanctioning body of world's fairs, the Bureau International
des Expositions (or BIE), has recognized the Budapest exhibition of 1896 as a registered
"Universal Exhibition." Much of this confusion relates to Hungary's status as a dual partner
in the Austro-Hungarian empire, a point I will explore. Significantly, the BIE was estab-
lished by an international diplomatic convention, signed in Paris in 1928, with the stated
function of establishing rules and defining the characteristics of world's fairs and with the
intent to control the frequency and quality of exhibitions. Since Budapest's 1896 exhibi-
tion occurred before clear categorizations were imposed, the status of the event remains
unclear.
 Slavic Review

At the same time, the city would become a site through which to ex-
pand the conceptual boundaries of the Hungarian state while attempting
to rival and even displace die main imperial center of Vienna technologi-
cally. As architectural historian Eve Blau has observed about the distinc-
tive nature of central and eastern European nationalism in contrast to
western models, the manifestation of new identities for nations of the
region was almost completely an urban phenomenon. 5 As an urban event
predicated on cosmopolitan appearances and well-crafted publicity, the
world's fair provided the perfect foil to centuries old battles over land
claims and minority rights. Within the context of assimilationist poli-
tics, which reflected the sometimes illusionary and contingent nature of
Austro-Hungarian dualism itself (an Austrian emperor could ceremoni-
ously and with seeming ease don the Hungarian crown and immediately
assimilate to die Hungarian cause) the conflation of a Hungarian nation-
alist agenda and the dynamics of urban modernism and preparation for
an event on the scale of a world's fair proved most profound and indeed
troubling. 6
By the time the Hungarian Millennial Exhibition opened in Budapest
to an international audience on 2 May 1896, much of this discourse, in-
cluding the semantics of whether the event was a national exhibition or
world's fair, appeared unimportant and continued to operate below the
perception of many tourists. To be sure, at first glance all of the expected
attractions and features of a nineteenth-century world's fair were visibly
present. Staged in a large city park on the eastern edges of Budapest,
the exposition operated for the six-month span typical of a world's fair
(three months longer than a national exhibition) and adhered to die
fairgoers' expectations, offering the full range of predictable monuments
and infrastructure. 7 All of this took place in a typical, if not all together
ordinary, nineteenth-century exhibition where visitors navigated offi-
cially sanctioned spaces with carefully detailed maps that clearly delin-

5. Eve Blau, "The City as Protagonist: Architecture and the Cultures of Central Eu-
rope," in Eve Blau and Monika Platzer, eds., Shaping the Great City: Modern Architecture in
Central Europe, 1890-1937 (New York, 1999), 14.
6. For a discussion on Magyarization in Austria-Hungary through the nineteenth
century, see Robert Nemes, The Once and Future Budapest (DeKalb, 2005). This study pro-
vides a recent contribution to the growing understanding of how Budapest was consciously
modeled as a Hungarian capital, despite its heterogeneous population. Notably, as Nemes
asserts at one point in his study, "In nineteenth century Hungary and in Habsburg Central
Europe more generally, individuals' national affiliations were not written in stone. If they
wanted, men and women could show their national loyalties by joining a club, adopting a
new surname, buying seats at a theatre, or choosing a school for their children. For some
families, giving preference to the Hungarian language showed at least tacit approval for
the nationalist project. Alternatively, town dwellers could attempt to ignore the national
question altogether, change their minds, or profess loyalty to the Emperor-King, inter-
national socialism, or the Catholic Church. In this sense, historians are correct to describe
the process by which the population of Budapest became 'Hungarian' as spontaneous and
unplanned" (179, emphasis added).
7. This was also reflected in foreign press accounts that praised Budapest officials for
putting on a fair up to western standards. See, for example, "Hungary's Great Celebra-
tion," New York Times, 9June 1896.
The Hungarian Millennial Exhibition and Fin- de- Siecle Budapest 575

eated pavilions and points of interest. 8 Reflecting elements of world's fair

and universal exposition venues dating back to London's Great Exhibition
of 1851, the Budapest exhibition offered a blended assortment of tech-
nological and industrial advancements along with a cross-section of the
Austro-Hungarian empire's cultural offerings, providing within the frame-
work of an international fair, the dedicated "nationality street" showcasing
the divergent cultures of minority groups within the Austro-Hungarian
empire. 9 These elements, together with the requisite sprinkling of amuse-
ments and a spectacle or two thrown in for good measure, complied with
the standard recipe for successful events of this type. Created widi both
city visitors and tourists in mind, the Budapest Millennial Exhibition
aimed primarily to familiarize fairgoers with and educate them about the
broader themes of Hungarian statehood, progress, and modernity, while
normalizing these ideas within the context of national advancement tied
to cosmopolitan internationalism.
But by the summer of 1896, the focus of popular and international
interest increasingly coalesced around the city of Budapest itself and what
could be described as more unofficial spaces of exhibition. One reason for
this shift was that the promotion and advertisement of the city's most visu-
ally and technologically interesting attractions and entertainments strate-
gically drew public attention beyond the fairgrounds. The phenomena of
emphasizing off-site venues was perhaps best recorded in a whole host of in-
ternational guidebooks about Budapest that sprang up in the mid-1890s.10
For example, the guide titled A Mulato Budapest (Budapest's Amusements),
published in French, German, and Hungarian, described the city's various
attractions and nightlife, emphasizing all the urban adventures available
to its readers beyond the official fairgrounds.11 Indeed, the Hungarian
state's many contradictions, related to its dual partnership with Austria,
its perceived modernity, and its geographical position between eastern
and western Europe, were made particularly apparent through the capital
city's newly built spaces that often turned to the spectacular, theatrical, and
technological in order to challenge and operate beyond the parameters
of official and traditional Austro-Hungarian monuments and spaces.12
8. In both Hungarian and English tourist guidebooks to Budapest for 1896, the map
shown of the exhibition appeared largely unchanged, suggesting a continuity and control
over how the exhibition was officially pictured and charted out for visitors.
9. Together with the prominent "nationality street" where Croatian, Serbian, Roma-
nian, and other minority groups' art and culture were displayed, the fairground included
a small-scale replica of Old Buda Castle as it was imagined under Turkish occupation
between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (complete with a large mosque). The in-
clusion of other national cultures in the Austro-Hungarian empire at the exhibition simul-
taneously leant an air of internationalism and colonialism often present at world's fairs.
10. See, for example, die following guides published in English: Joseph Kahn and
F. A. Klein, Practical English Guide to the City ofBudapest (Budapest, 1896); Hungary, Budapest
with Fourteen Maps and Plans: Singer and Wolfner's Handbooks for Travellers (Budapest, 1896);
Morice Celled, The Millennial Realm of Hungary: Its Past and Present (Budapest, 1896).
11. Henrik Lenkei, A Mulato Budapest (Budapest, 1896).
12. Certain monuments, artworks, and buildings were more careful to include direct
reference to the dual monarchy. For example, the Millennial Monument under construc-
tion during the exhibition, reserved the last five spaces for statues on the left of the col-
576 Slavic Review

These characteristics of the city thus came to play an important role in

Hungary's promotion of Budapest as much more than just another place
where the Austrian emperor ruled.
The phenomena of coexisting and often competing official and un-
official exhibition venues also dovetailed with how the flexible category
of "world's fairs" had come to be promoted by the end of the nineteenth
century. 13 The first generation of world's fairs beginning in the mid-
nineteenth century championed a public education angle for their attrac-
tions and sites of interest, but the fin-de-siecle exhibitions increasingly
focused on spectacle and fantasy as a way to continue attracting audi-
ences. 14 At the same time, the commercialization and financing of fairs,
which shifted away from strictly national and local government interests
and into the hands of private investors, meant that many of the more
novel attractions of the later exhibitions occurred outside the traditional
venue of the exhibition fairground. For Budapest, following closely on
the heels of Chicago's successful World's Columbian Exposition of 1893,
there was a prevailing sense of wanting to copy or even outdo what had
been shown in earlier expositions. Indeed, in Chicago in 1893, the display
of new technologies and spectacles had helped catapult the midwestern
city to international stature as a modern metropolis—a fact that did not
go unnoticed by the Budapest exhibition's organizers. 15 Thus, within ele-
ments of the Budapest public, the desire existed to extend the perceived
boundaries of the Hungarian nation through the mechanisms of publicity
and attention generated by the city as it prepared for its worldwide debut.
At the same time, these elements (an unlikely mix of Hungarian nation-
alists, cosmopolitan supporters of Budapest, and entrepreneurs seeking
to turn a profit during the event), together with Budapest exhibition or-
ganizers, recognized both the desire and die need to meet the expecta-
tions of the Budapest public and international visitors, many of whom
anticipated the entertainments and off-site attractions of the exhibition
as much as, if not more than, the traditional displays.

onnade for members of the ruling Habsburgs (the statues on the right were designated
heroes of Hungarian history), while the newly constructed Palace of Ait was modeled on
the Viennese-inspired neoclassical museum design.
13. For broader studies, see Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas: The Expositions Univer-
selles, Great Exhibitions and World's Fairs, 1851-1939 (Manchester, Eng., 1988);John E. Fin-
dling and Kimberly D. Pelle, Historical Dictionary of World's Fairs and Expositions, 1851-1988
(New York, 1990); Robert W. Rydell, World ofFairs: The Century-of-Progress Expositions (Chi-
cago, 1993); Robert W. Rydell, Nancy E. Gwinn, and James Burkhart Gilbert, Fair Repre-
sentations: World'sFairs and the Modern World (Amsterdam, 1994); Penelope Harvey, Hybrids
of Modernity: Anthropology, the Nation State and the Universal Exhibition (London, 1996); Erik
Mattie, World'sFairs (New York, 1998); Robert W. Rydell,John E. Findling, and Kimberly D.
Pelle, Fair America: World's Fairs in the United States (Washington, D.C., 2000).
14.1 first encountered this idea in Alice Freifeld, Nationalism and the Crowd in Liberal
Hungary, 1848-1914 (Washington, D.C., 2000), 268-78. Freifeld discusses, among other
valuable details, the Budapest public's interest in the attractions of the Chicago World's
Fair of 1893.
15. Ibid., 270. This awareness of the 1893 exhibition in Chicago is not surprising
since details about the fair (from Hungarian visitors and correspondents) spread through
local newspaper accounts of the event through the 1890s.
The Hungarian Millennial Exhibition andFin-de-Siecle Budapest 577

Reconfiguring Urban Space and Spectatorship: Andrassy Avenue and die

Sightlines of Budapest
Since the mid-nineteenth century, Vienna, the seat of Habsburg power
and the prime imperial capital of Austria-Hungary, had renovated its ur-
ban core to resemble a living museum for the monarchy. It was a city
largely perceived as more focused on past grandeur and achievements
dnan dedicated to forging a modern future. And while the imperial cap-
ital's final Ringstrasse plans in the mid-nineteenth century allowed for a
mix of public and private development, providing something of a model
for Budapest, the many social, administrative, and political challenges fac-
ing the Hungarian city were radically different.16 In this sense Budapest
had not totally succumbed to the emperor's guiding vision for the ideal
Habsburg city and therefore followed an urban development model bol-
stered by its promotion of technology that appeared in many ways more
cosmopolitan, international, and open to foreign capital influence than
Vienna.17 Vision was also privileged, and tremendous energy was devoted
to preparing the city to be seen, inspected, and legitimized by the outside
world. Moreover, there was an interest in displaying the very kinds of opti-
cal technologies that could continue fuelling the relation between observ-
ers and their experience of modernity.18 As such, the effort to modernize
Budapest was closely linked to the goal of uniting a multinational and
multiethnic urban population through visual cues in the cityscape, link-
ing a constructed Hungarian superiority and Magyar nomadic heritage.
In this profound sense, the plan for Budapest was that it should be Hun-
garian first and foremost.19 As a result, the modernizing city of Budapest
provided not only the critical venue and space within which to foster an
expanded perception of Hungarian national consciousness on the eve
of the Millennial Exhibition, but also one that extended beyond situated
borders and threatened to rival Vienna for global attention. Dubbed the
"Yankee City of the Old World" by one American reporter, Budapest's

16. Hall, Planning Europe's Capital Cities, 335-36. Hall explains that whereas in Vienna
the development process was greatly facilitated by the fact that most of the land used to
build up the Ringstrasse district was in public ownership and unbuilt (over 600 plots were
sold to private individuals and companies once the old city walls were torn down in 1857,
and the revenue from these sales was enough to cover the cost of the public buildings),
the situation in Budapest required a large number of existing areas to be demolished and
populations to be uprooted, not unlike the situation in Paris under Haussmannization.
This caused far more tension in the planning enterprise and meant that far more interests
had to be taken into account in the process of implementing a new urban plan.
17. For examples from the foreign press about Budapest's rapid growth, see Albert
Shaw, "Budapest, The Rise of a New Metropolis," Century 44, no. 2 (1892); "Hungary, Its
Rapid Progress," New York Times, 21 June 1896; Richard Harding Davis, "Yankee City of the
Old World," Washington Post, 28 February 1987.
18. The camera, cinematograph, and panorama are examples of these new tech-
nologies and are discussed in detail in Dorothy Barenscott, "Troubling Modernity: Spatial
Politics, Technologies of Seeing, and the Crisis of the City and the World's Exhibition in
Fin de Siecle Budapest" (PhD diss., University of British Columbia, 2007).
19. This is the argument at the core of Nemes's recent book on Budapest: Nemes, The
Once and Future Budapest.
578 Slavic Review

metropolitan status by 1896 also pushed visitors to identify with the Mil-
lennial Exhibition as something far more significant than just a national
event.20
Indeed, from its very creation in 1870, Budapest's Metropolitan Board
of Public Works was interested in balancing the needs of the growing city
against the attempt to accommodate Budapest's increasing status within
the dual empire. In the absence of a single overriding urban plan, the most
obvious characterization of Budapest's development post-1867 related to
its flexibility, outward expansiveness, and ambitious scope, qualities that
could be likened to the self-inventive nature expected of Europe's fastest
growing city of the period. 21 The city's boulevard system, made up of the
Small Boulevard and the new Great Boulevard was built upon the original
roads of die inner city, but unlike Vienna, where the Ringstrasse created a
single enclosed circle within the city center, Budapest's two largest boule-
vards served as concentric semi-circles defining the old town of Pest and
the expanding boundaries of the emerging metropolis. These boulevards
connected the fastest growing districts of Pest, where the newest apart-
ments, emerging businesses, cafes, and restaurants of the city were located.
Complementing these boulevards were radial roads stretching from the
urban center into the countryside and beyond. Connected through a sys-
tem of trams and omnibuses, Budapest's two main railway stations on the
eastern and western ends of Pest channeled a constant flow of people and
goods into and out of the city.22 As such, the role of communication and
transportation technology signaled a cultural imperative within Hungary
that upheld Budapest as its treasured centerpiece. In fact, an impressive
600-page volume detailing all of Budapest's technical, engineering, and
communicadon technologies with extensive diagrams, maps, and statistics
was published to coincide with the fair's opening in 1896 in Hungarian,
English, French, and German editions. 23 But rather than representing the
conscious efforts of city planners, the master plan came about, as archi-
tectural historian Jozsef Sisa observes, more as a kind of "spontaneous
evolution." 24
Despite die lack of an overall plan for Budapest, it was still important
to articulate the city's eventual position as Austria-Hungary's second im-
perial city, a status officially bestowed only five years before the Millennial
Exhibition was set to open. One of the first major projects Budapest's

20. Davis, "Yankee City of the Old World."

21. By the turn of the nineteenth century, Budapest was the eighdi largest city in
Europe following London, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, St. Petersburg, Moscow, Hamburg. Voros,
"Birth of Budapest," 104.
22. The first electric street cars appeared in Budapest in 1887 and by 1900 all horse-
drawn carriages had been replaced by electric trolleys (which were already running before
and during the Millennial Exhibition).
23. See Edvi Hies Aladar, Budapest Muszaki Utmutatoja (Budapest, 1896). Significantly
this publication was reissued in 1996 in its original form to coincide with the 100th an-
niversary of the Millennial Exhibition.
24. Jozsef Sisa, "Budapest," Centropa: A Journal ofCentral European Architecture 1, no. 1
(2001): 17. Hall also emphasizes this point in his discussion of Budapest's urban develop-
ment. Hall, Planning Europe's Capital Cities, 252.
The Hungarian Millennial Exhibition and Fin- de- Siecle Budapest 579

new Metropolitan Board of Public Works undertook was the construc-

tion of a broad 2.5-kilometer-long avenue initially called Radial Street,
derived from the Hungarian word for "sun-ray" and modeled in part on
the Champs-Elysees in Paris.25 Completed between 1871 and 1878, the
avenue was initiated in order to connect the fastest growing part of Pest's
inner city with a partially completed 600,000-square-meter urban park
(City Grove) at the northeast corner of the city that would ultimately fea-
ture a series of national monuments and become the location for the
1896 exhibition. 26 Radial Street's broad vista—enhanced by the progres-
sive widening of the avenue at die north end nearest the City Grove—was
deliberately designed to draw spectators' eyes up and down the expanse
of the street, emphasizing the scale and scope of the city. This was once
again in stark contrast to Vienna's circular Ringstrasse, which encouraged
a more insular and inward looking toward a limited elite public in the
city's core.
Budapest inhabitants understood that the construction of this long
avenue involved much more than a road connecting the inner city to the
park. Renamed Andrassy Avenue in 1885 after Hungary's first premier
and during preparations for the Millennial Exhibition, the thoroughfare
gave form to all that the new metropolis desired most to project of itself
as a cosmopolitan metropolis. 27 Visual pleasure, the public's experience
of the street, and technological advances promoting mobility proved key
among these interrelated qualities. For example, city planners keen to
encourage business along parts of the avenue did not want to disrupt the
traffic flow, yet were also concerned not to distract from the avenue's ap-

25. The influence of Paris's city plan is clearly visible in Budapest. As Hall argues,
Budapest and Rome are the two European cities most influenced by the radial road and
inner boulevarding scheme of Paris. This approach was both a political choice in the case
of Budapest, since it differed dramatically from Vienna's city plan, and also likely a result
of city planners' traveling to the Paris exhibition of 1867 where the city was on display for
the world to see. Hall, Planning Europe's Capital Cities, 347-49.
26. One of the distinctive features of the park, as sociologist Gabor Gyani points out
in his reading of the space, was how its commission and planning dovetailed with An-
drassy Avenue's construction to generate a more cohesive urban character for the central,
suburban, and industrial sectors of the city and their publics. As Gyani recalls, German
architect Christian Heinrich Nebbien had planned the park after what has been described
as the first competition in the history of landscape architecture in 1813. And in an effort
to disassociate himself from prevailing trends in gardening that privileged what Nebbien
termed the "contemplative and edifying recreation of the individual," he envisioned a gar-
den that he claimed would be "the immediate possession and creation of the people" and
"the purest expression of the great virtues of a people and the product of the spirit, the
taste, the patriotism and the culture of a noble nation." One aspect of Nebbien's plan was
to create large monuments to the major historical figures of Hungary's history. These de-
velopments, stalled for nearly seven decades, provided a blueprint and location for Hun-
gary's first national exhibition in 1885, and the eventual Millennial Exhibition of 1896.
Gabor Gyani, "Uses and Misuses of Public Space in Budapest: 1873-1914," in Bender and
Schorske, eds., Budapest and New York, 90.
27. The most comprehensive and detailed account of Budapest's post-1867 develop-
ment (including Andrassy Avenue as a core focus) continues to be an early 1930 study
published through Budapest's Metropolitan Board of Public Works. See Laszlo Siklossy,
Hogvan epult Budapest? 1870-1930 (Budapest, 1931).
 Slavic Review

pearance or vistas with the "ugly" marks of train tracks.28 As a result city
engineers would opt to place their transportation system for the street
below ground—a key technological innovation that emulated London's
city planning and the new engineering techniques associated with great
world cities. Such concern over visuality and how the street would be tra-
versed by the public was therefore clearly significant and a definite cause
for concern with the impending exhibition. The city inhabitants' overall
sense of ownership and pride in the city's impressive avenue and new
subway system offered visitors and inhabitants alike a way to participate
in and experience the new metropolis and its connections to a revital-
ized Hungarian identity. As Akos Moravanszky suggests in his discussion
of Andrassy Avenue and its eventual role as the main thoroughfare to
the 1896 exhibition, strolling along the street brought to mind city plan-
ners' consistent attempts to meld the creation of a bourgeois city with
the desires of the Hungarian national cause.29 Locals and foreign fairgo-
ers alike could experience a simultaneous closeness with the street and a
constructed "Hungarianness," promoting an intimacy that was arguably
more accessible and desirable to a broader urban middle class than an
elite minority of nobles continuing to reside in the countryside or remote
Buda hills, or the core of Austria's ruling class within Vienna's Ringstrasse
district.
The difficulty and obstacles involved in acquiring the land, permits,
and government clout to clear the area necessary for the long and broad
expanse of this boulevard was closely linked to the reality that a post-
feudal economy, based on capitalism and private property, posed. It was
also rooted, however, in the productive ambiguities that dual power pre-
sented for the metropolis of Budapest. As urban historian Charles Maier
fittingly asks in a rhetorical question related to the problem of city plan-
ning throughout the Austro-Hungarian empire, how was the modernist
project for ordering urban space and designing its representational struc-
tures compatible with a political framework that, as an empire, insisted on
tradition, the imposition of spatial hierarchy, and limited strivings for au-
tonomy?30 The problem, in many ways, emanated from a lack of real power
on the part of city administrators and planners to generate a cohesive plan
for Budapest. Moravanszky notes in his discussion of Andrassy Avenue's
construction, for example, that a look at any city map reveals the failed
attempt to coordinate Budapest's Chain Bridge, its inner city boulevards,
and the new street into a collective urban ensemble. 31 In one sense then,
28. Pest's "beautifying committee," established in 1808, was originally charged with
embellishing the city through architectural upgrades to the urban environment and had
a direct influence on the final plan for Andrassy Avenue. Hall, Planning Europe's Capital
Cities, 246. For example, in order to maintain the elegance of Budapest's boulevards, the
board denied applications by horse tram companies to build trams on Andrassy Avenue.
Siklossy, Hogvan epull Budapest? 167; Blau and Platzer, eds., Shaping the Great City, 108.
29. Akos Moravanszky, Competing Visions: Aesthetic Invention and Social Imagination in
Central European Architecture, 1867-1918 (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), 50.
30. Charles Maier, "City, Empire, and the Imperial Aftermath: Contending Contexts
for the Urban Vision," in Blau and Platzer, eds., Shaping the Great City, 25.
31. Moravanszky, Competing Visions, 46. Hall also makes a similar observation through
his discussion of the problematic traffic patterns created in Budapest as a result of An-
The Hungarian Millennial Exhibition and Fin- de- Steele Budapest 581

the inability to consolidate the city of Budapest in terms of traditional

built space demanded the adoption of new models. At the same time, the
perceived failure to unite the city allowed new possibilities, opportunities,
and ingenuity in design to arise. A direct consequence was that Budapest
quickly developed an international reputation for producing technically
skilled tradespeople, engineers, and architects—a development that was
proudly promoted by the time of the exhibition. 32
Indeed, by 1896, foreign media covering the exhibition noted the ex-
tensive use of emerging communication, transportation, and electrical
technologies to bind and unite the city in new and innovative ways. And
although Budapest's streets may not have been as symmetrically arranged
as desired, the dense circuits of streetcars, trams, omnibuses, and the new
subway—linking up to the city's large railway stations and spreading out
to the countryside and beyond—allowed for a substantial perceptual shift
in how the public and tourists new to the city constructed their mental
map of the sprawling metropolis as anything but disjointed or confusing.
The creation of telephone and telegraph networks also increased within
Budapest and extended to the most remote parts of the country by the
time the exhibition opened.
But as much as the city of Budapest was inventing itself in the context
of modern developments, technology, and the new regimes of capital pro-
moted at the Millennial Exhibition, so too was its citizenry, many of whom
had moved to Budapest to start new lives. In terms of sheer numbers, the
answer to the question of the Budapest public lies with the sevenfold in-
crease in population from 1840 to 1900, making Budapest Europe's fastest
growing and youngest city in the final decades of the nineteenth century,
and the eighth largest capital city of Europe in the same period. 33 With a
population of 730,000 by 1900, Budapest was largely a city of immigrants.
But what is strikingly revealed in the statistics is the nearly unmatched
heterogeneity of the Austro-Hungarian empire, in particular within the
two imperial capitals. For example, while the proportion of immigrants
to Paris was a mere 6.3 percent in 1900, the immigrant population in
Vienna exceeded 60 percent, and the situation in Budapest was similar:
in 1890, only 39 percent of city dwellers were born locally. In 1890 and
the years immediately leading up to the Millennial Exhibition, 52 percent
of Budapest's inhabitants came from ethnically and linguistically "other"
places from within the Austro-Hungarian empire, while a full quarter of

drassy Avenue's apparent disconnect with die smaller boulevard closest to the city core.
See Hall, Planning Europe's Capital Cities, 252.
32. For an account of the period referring to this reputation, see "Technical Edu-
cation," Catholic World 28, no. 166 (1879) where the author refers to Budapest's main
technical college as "turning out some of die best mechanics in Europe" (521), recom-
mending that Hungary's model for technical education be adopted in the United States.
For a history of technical education in Hungary, see Andrea Karpati and Emil Gaul, "Art
and Technology in Hungarian Education: Conflicts and Compromises," Leonardo 23,
no. 2 / 3 (1990): 189-96.
33. All cited statistics on Budapest's population distribution in the fin-de-siecle pe-
riod can be found in Bender and Schorske, eds., Budapest and New York, 2 - 4 , 30-36; and
Moritz Csaky, "Multicultural Communities: Tensions and Qualities, the Example of Cen-
tral Europe," in Blau and Platzer, eds., Shaping the Great City, 45.
582 Slavic Review

Budapest's population claimed a Jewish identity.34 This dovetailed, not

insignificantly, with the needs of both the Hungarian government and the
ethnic Magyar majority to expand Hungary's power base by appealing to
models of living and being in the world that encouraged the same kind of
modern subjectivity promoted during and in anticipation of world's fairs.
Based on notions of progress, mobility, and a forward-looking sensibility,
the growing Budapest public could thus articulate its break widi the past
and claim distinction in the eyes of the world.

Architectural Compromise and the Hungarian Parliament Building

The many contradictions involved in Budapest's urban planning on the
eve of the exhibition also culminated in Budapest's diverse architectural
landscape by the late nineteenth century. 35 This was driven by both the
favorable economic conditions that pushed for the city to expand beyond
its original borders in time for 1896 and a turn to new techniques of con-
struction that led to departures in construction from more traditional
models. 36 As a result, the rise of an eclectic architecture in Budapest—as
a kind of deliberate non-style style—reflected the open-ended nature of
the new metropolis as one in search of origins, yet poised for the future,
and promoting an architectural program willing to draw on a variety of
influences.
A turn to technology and conceptual reorganization in Budapest were
therefore seen as necessary even in the most significant buildings repre-
senting Hungarian power in the dual empire. Once the 1867 compro-
mise with Austria had been reached, plans for the new Hungarian Parlia-
ment building in Budapest began to take shape. Market problems and
a monetary crisis in the restructured empire prevented any plans from
being implemented through the 1870s, however. By the 1880s, as plans
to construct the building in conjunction with the Millennial Exhibition
unfolded, the expectations for the structure were incredibly high. 37 Driv-
ing this enthusiasm was not only the long delay but also the completion
of Vienna's new Parliament building, designed by Baron Theophil von
Hansen and constructed between 1874 and 1883 in a Greek revival style.

34. Ibid. This is a generally agreed upon estimate in the literature concerning Buda-
pest's Jewish community that ranges between 20-25 percent. Still, the Jewish population
of Budapest in the 1890s is at times difficult to pinpoint exactly because of the unknown
number of Jews (likely assimilated through the process of Magyarization) who would not
be identified as Jewish in the official statistics of the day.
35. The mix of architectural styles is a key characteristic of Budapest's urban devel-
opment and is discussed variously by Peter Hanak, The Garden and the Workshop: Essays on
the Cultural History of Vienna and Budapest (Princeton, 1998), 38-43; Nemes, The Once and
Future Budapest, 160-65; and Voros, "Birth of Budapest," 127.
36. Voros, "Birth of Budapest," 127.
37. The most comprehensive study of the Parliament building exists as an edited col-
lection that includes extensive drawings, illustrations, and accompanying statistics (also
partially translated into English): Gabor Eszter, ed., Az Orszdg Hdza. House of the Nation:
Parliament Plans for Buda-Pest 1784-1884 (Budapest, 2000). The building is also discussed
in a separate chapter in a recent book on the chief architect of the Hungarian Parliament
building, Imre Steindl.Jozsef Sisa, Imre Steindl (Budapest, 2005).
The Hungarian Millennial Exhibition and Fin- de- Siecle Budapest 583

These developments fueled Hungarian politicians' desires to give form to

Hungary's new status within die dual empire in time for the 1896 exhibi-
tion. Moreover, in Budapest, the renovation and updates taking place on
the Habsburg Royal Castle across the Danube River in anticipation of the
exhibition spurred plans to equal, if not surpass, the architectural state-
ments being made in the emperor's name in clear site of the proposed
home for the new Parliament. 38 One of the first elements that the planning
committee borrowed from other parliamentary projects initiated during
the nineteenth century was the call for an international competition. 39
Following a recommendation made by an 1869 economic committee, the
building was to impart "the proportions and shape of a memorial." 40 And
in the section on style, this committee recommended that due to the site
of the new building, "and of Hungary's historical past and development
of its constitution from the old times, the most suitable style . . . [was] to
be chosen from among Byzantine, Romanesque, Gothic, or variants of
Renaissance mode." 41 Conspicuously absent from this list was the classical
style used for the new Viennese parliament.
Interestingly, as historian Eszter Gabor suggests in her detailed ac-
count of the parliamentary records related to the competition and evalu-
ation process, the discussion over style was at first quite muted. This was
partly attributable to the simple fact that from the earliest stages of the
competition it was already apparent that neo-gothic would likely receive
the best chance of winning out as the style "of choice" for Hungary's new
Parliament building. Possessing the advantage of producing great height,
open space, and allowing for maximum light, the neo-gothic revival of-
fered an architectural vocabulary already associated with parliamentary
government. Moreover, as many Hungarian politicians argued, the gothic
vocabulary allowed the most flexibility in adjusting to place, climate, and
function, being a style associated not only with European centers as a
whole but also with the British neo-gothic revival and the reformist goals
best suited to Hungary's new constitution. 42 As Gabor argues, however,
once the evaluation process became a part of the public discourse, a
number of objections related to the gothic style surfaced. Some commit-
tee members believed that the gothic was still too closely associated with

38. The updates to the Habsburg Royal Castle included extending and giving a more
"splendid appearance" to the section facing the Danube River—the part of the castle that
was ironically enough the back of the original structure. Hall, Planning Europe's Capital
Cities, 253.
39. See Gabor Eszter, "The Competition to Plan a Permanent Parliament Building,
1883," in Eszter, ed., Az Orszdg Hdza.
40. Ibid., 357.
41. Ibid., 360.
42. Numerous historians have described nineteenth-century Hungarian politicians
such as Istvan Szechenyi and Gyula Andrassy as "Anglophiles" who wanted their preferred
model of a parliamentary democracy, Britain, to be the model for Budapest. In their eyes,
the neo-gothic signaled a particular vocabulary of liberalism that many Hungarians were
keen to endorse. See, for example, the discussion in Jozsef Sisa, "Neo-Gothic Architec-
ture and Restoration of Historic Buildings in Central Europe: Friedrich Schmidt and His
School," Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 61, no. 2 (2002): 179; Blau and
Platzer, eds., Shaping the Great City, 108.
584 Slavic Review

Germanic power; other critics pointed out that secular buildings built in
the gothic style had no tradition in Hungary. 43 In fact, as some parties
argued, the best proposal took up the Byzantine style since it embraced
the historical traditions and associations emanating from eastern lands. 44
Much of this debate turned on what comprised a Hungarian style and
reflected once again the complex national identity Hungary was defining
and giving visual shape to in the 1890s during the lead up to tlie Millen-
nial Exhibition.
It is in this entangled context of the social and political renewal of Bu-
dapest in the 1880s and 1890s that the eventual selection of Imre Steindl's
design for the Hungarian Parliament is usefully examined. Chosen, quite
fittingly, as a kind of "compromise" in and of itself, Steindl's design tided
simply, but polemically, "Alkotmany" (Constitution) was accepted with
many provisos and calls for modifications.45 The basic plan of the Parlia-
ment building, however, remained unchanged. Modeled in a neo-gothic
vocabulary complete with steep roofs and pointed turrets, Steindl's design
defied simple classification with a pronounced and almost ill-fitting central
dome, an element of Romanesque rather than gothic architecture. The
unusual combination of elements was, however, what finally convinced
the building's planning committee of its suitability. This stylistic amalgam
offered a way of endorsing and linking medieval references to Hungary
under the reign of Christian kings from the eleventh to the early sixteenth
centuries with the earlier ancient period of the ninth and tenth centu-
ries when Hungary's chosen founding fathers (the ancient Magyars) were
believed to have setded and ruled over the Carpathian Basin. Measuring
268 meters long and 123 meters wide, the building's interior included
10 courtyards, 13 passenger and freight elevators, 27 gates, 29 staircases,
and 691 rooms (including more than 200 offices). The final structure took
just under two decades to complete (from 1885 to 1904). The use of indig-
enous products was also enforced through regular inspections, resulting
in a boom for certain segments of the Hungarian industrial economy and
becoming a well publicized, though visibly silent, part of the final project.
And although the building was not completed in time for the 1896 Mil-
lennial Exhibition (the target completion date), it was significant that the
building appeared complete, ironically emphasizing the largely symbolic
function that the new Parliament building performed in fair festivities
involving the Habsburg authority.
The Parliament building also echoed and reinforced the stated theme
of the Millennial Exhibition: to draw attention to one thousand years of
Hungarian history and technology. Most strikingly, the building's high
visibility and dramatic sprawling design along the shores of the Pest side
of the Danube River made the structure an instant and imposing land-
mark of international interest, a monument worthy of world's fair status
43. Eszter, "The Competition to Plan a Permanent Parliament Building, 1883,"
362-63.
44. Ibid., 362.
45. For a detailed discussion, see Jozsef Sisa, "From the Competition Design to the
Definitive Design," in Eszter, ed., Az OrszdgHdza.
The Hungarian Millennial Exhibition and Fin- de- Siecle Budapest 585

(such as London's Crystal Palace for example). 46 In clear view of anyone

crossing the Chain Bridge from the Buda side into the heart of the city,
it was a building that would be impossible to overlook. The evocation
of 896, the year the ancient Magyar peoples were said to have arrived in
the Carpathian Basin, was repeated in a number of the buildings' formal
elements, including the 96-meter-high dome and the 96 steps inside the
front entrance. At the same time, the new structure showcased cutting-
edge technology; the implementation of a sophisticated cooling system
and the use of extensive interior and exterior electrical lighting were both
celebrated innovations.47 What seemed to matter most, however, was that
the new building, in dialogue with the Habsburg Royal Castle across the
Danube, and double in size when seen lit at night and reflected in the
river, announced its significance and importance to the world in a kind
of modern theatrical projection.
The final design of the Parliament building was thus marked by an
attempt to restore and reshape, revealing and giving form to a tension ex-
isting in the very nature of late nineteenth-century Hungarian "compro-
mise" politics, nation building, and Budapest's complex urban makeup.
The Parliament building also provided early evidence of an entirely differ-
ent technology of seeing, bound up in the disjunctured eclecticism of its
architectural style, one that sought to liberate itself from certain past tradi-
tions, and especially Viennese and Austrian associations, while construct-
ing new ones in its place. In this sense, the gothic elements in Steindl's
plans signaled—paradoxically—an unexpected modernity through their
alignment with a technological mandate to electrify and light up the Bu-
dapest sky with its presence. The Parliament building's turn toward theat-
ricality, in tandem with the reconceptuaUzation of the spaces of Budapest
and in close association with the subway and supported by elements of the
structure's final eclectic shape and positioning within the city, contributed
to a whole new way of experiencing and seeing the metropolis. And this
rapidly expanding modern metropolis had paradoxically created one of
the largest parliamentary buildings in the world for a state that only ex-
isted, in the collective minds of a majority of the Hungarian political au-
thority, as a small virtual entity outside fully independent statehood. 48

Budapest's Underground Subway and the "Moving Street"

In the immediate years leading up to the 1896 exhibition, the Hungar-
ian Parliament building and Budapest's underground subway system were

46. Almost every major foreign press report written in anticipation of the 1896 exhi-
bition mentioned (and often pictured) the Parliament building.
47. These statistics and technological advancements are partly discussed in Sisa,
"From the Competition Design to the Definitive Design," and were also relayed to me
by officials at the Hungarian Parliament building during two separate tours I took of the
structure in Budapest in 2002 and 2005.
48. A number of debates in the Hungarian parliamentat the time centered on the ques-
tion of building such a lavish and costly structure outside the parameters of real statehood.
For a discussion, see Sisa, "From the Competition Design to the Definitive Design," 399.
 Slavic Review

bound together in the minds of the city's citizens by their simultaneous

construction. Consequently, the spatial configurations of two of Hunga-
ry's most expansive public monuments are not difficult to compare. The
Parliament building, constructed along the important commercial water-
way of the Danube River, brought to mind a self-consciously bourgeois
city and the Hungarian region's wider interconnection and transnational
visibility with a dense network of transportation and communication
pathways facilitating the flow of people, goods, and capital in and out of
Budapest. The subway ran within a few blocks of the Parliament building,
shuttling passengers efficiently and quickly underneath Andrassy Avenue
to places of business and residence, but also to the city's most important
monuments to nation being planned at the site of the 1896 Millennial
Exhibition. Both shared a tie to a fast-moving mobility associating Hun-
garian power and control of resources—the Parliament building situated
on the empire's quick-flowing and most important river, the subway as an
underground rail system constructed under Budapest's most dynamic and
action-filled street.
One of the most critical developments in Hungary's nineteenth-
century history that served to link technology with statehood and individ-
ual subjectivity was the railway.49 Before 1870, regions of the Carpathian
Basin were effectively isolated from one another and from the capital city
Budapest. The market for exports was therefore limited by distance and
the ability to organize disparately situated operations. Yet in the three
short decades leading up to the Millennial Exhibition, Hungary's rapid
and intensive construction of rail lines (a network of 17,000 kilometers
that by 1900 ranked sixth in Europe for density, ahead of Austria and even
the United Kingdom) allowed Hungarian exports to penetrate lucrative
western markets and spark the steady flow of Austro-German and French
capital into the country. 50 In this way, the Hungarian industrial complex
was able to bypass Austria and obtain the much needed capital and mar-
kets to fuel its own industrial revolution. 51 Nationalized in the early 1890s,
the Hungarian railway was indirectly responsible for half of all mortgages
taken out on Hungarian land, allowing for economic expansion outside
traditional markets and die development of smaller urban centers beyond
Budapest.52 And although railway expansion saw similar industrial devel-
opments in other parts of the world in the late nineteenth century, the
Hungarian railway flourished at precisely the same moment that critical
debates about national identity and sovereignty from the Austrian crown
were being waged in the public sphere. The railway provided a useful and
potent conceptual tool around which to construct and connect a Hungar-
ian national heritage, defining a very particular sense of ownership and
49. Ivan T. Berend, "From the Millennium to the Republic of Councils," in Gyongyi
Eri and Zsuzsa Jobbagyi, eds., A Golden Age: Art and Society in Hungary, 1896-1818 (Lon-
don, 1990), 9.
50. Ibid., 9-11.
51. This was incidentally a stated goal of the 1848 Hungarian revolutionaries.
52. Berend, "From the Millennium to the Republic of Councils," 9 - 1 1 .
The Hungarian Millennial Exhibition and Fin-de-Siecle Budapest 587

control over the land, while producing a radically different spatial rela-
tionship to challenge traditional modes of feudal organization.
Within Budapest, the heart and main circulatory hub around which
railway transport in Hungary operated, the construction of the new elec-
tric subway gave monumental shape and dimension to rapid rail trans-
port as a marker of modern Hungarian nationalism. 53 In fact, a subway
plan had been accepted by the Hungarian National Assembly as early as
1875, around the same time that plans for the new Parliament building
were first being discussed. Built under the new Andrassy Avenue in a stag-
geringly short period of time, the millennial subway took 2,000 workers
using state-of-the-art machinery and technology just under two years to
complete, in time for the Millennial Exhibition. Stretching 3.7 kilometers,
with trains leaving every two minutes, the new metro boasted eleven sta-
tions from one end of town to the other with a total carrying capacity
of 35,000 people a day. When completed and opened to the public by
Emperor Franz Joseph in an elaborate inauguration ceremony on the first
day of the Millennial Exhibition, the new underground system served two
critical functions. First, in practical terms, the subway was built to shuttle
the expected crowds of fairgoers quickly and efficiently from the dense in-
ner city of Pest to City Grove fairgrounds. Second, the new underground
electrified rail system served as the technological centerpiece of the Bu-
dapest exhibition, becoming among the exhibition's most popular and
significant attractions.
Indeed, even more than the colossal Parliament building, Budapest's
metro would identify the city as a technologically advanced and world-
class metropolis, and this cutting-edge mode of city transportation gar-
nered publicity and interest from city planners as far away as New York.54
Importantly, the cut-and-cover technique of building the underground
rail lines called for a full excavation of the street, which necessitated skill-
ful engineering. And while the metro technically bore the name of the
emperor, to acknowledge his role as Hungary's official monarch, the tech-
nology, planning, and construction of the line was closely associated with
Hungary and with a carefully constructed heritage of Hungarian ingenu-
ity, a result of the international publicity generated around the subway
during the lead up to the 1896 fair. The metro's financing reinforced this
perception, since funding was provided in large part by the Hungarian

53. Many primary and secondary sources discuss the technical details of the subway.
In addition to material gathered at exhibits in Budapest's Millennial Underground Mu-
seum (strategically located at one of the underground stations of the original 1896 subway
line), 1 also took statistics from the section devoted to the building of the subway in Aladar,
Budapest Muszaki Ulmutatoja, 404-16, and from a period account (with reprinted photo-
graphs) detailed in Vasdrnapi Ujsdg4S, no. 17 (1896).
54. Engineers from New York and Boston, for example, visited Budapest around the
time of the 1896 fair and made plans to implement a similar subway system in their own
cities. See George C. Crocker, "The Passenger Traffic of Boston and the Subway," New
England Magazine 14, no. 5 (1899); and American Institute of Electiical Engineers, The
New York Electrical Handbook; Being a Guide for Visitors from Abroad Attending the International
Electrical Congress, St. Louis, Mo., September, J 904 (New York, 1904).