Some years ago, I was working in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. It’s considered to be the unofficial capital of Transylvania, but my thoughts weren’t centred upon vampires. I had a few hours free and I walked to the central park, wrapped up against the autumn chill and carrying my camera. I found the park to be large and not terribly interesting: it’s a place of broad thoroughfares and the people all seemed to be hurrying through it rather than enjoying it. Perhaps that’s simply good sense on a cold day.

When I decided that I’d seen enough and started back to my hotel, my route took me past the Monumentul Rezistenței Anticomuniste – the Anti-Communist Resistance Monument. There are monuments like this throughout the countries that the Soviet Union occupied at the end of the Second World War, where it rapidly became the norm for anybody who spoke out against communism to be imprisoned in brutal conditions. Many such political prisoners never came home.

Monumentul Rezistenței Anticomuniste, 2013 – photo by ‘Teutorigos’ via Wikimedia

I stopped and studied the monument. (Like Roman Mars says, always read the plaque.) One thing that really stood out was that some unknown graffiti ‘artist’ had added a swastika to the white marble of the monument.

The previous day, I’d asked my hosts about the origins of the name, Cluj-Napoca, being told that “it’s not two different place names being brought together, like Buda and Pest.” Perhaps that’s why I had Budapest in mind, standing there with my camera and thinking about the years of repression under the communists.

And with that, we were off to the races. Budapest and the Hungarian Uprising would be the setting for a story, I decided. (Later, I discovered that historians now call it the Hungarian Revolution of 1956.) A photographer in the present day, who points his camera at things but gets pictures of the chaos of 1956; a woman who’s trying to document the fighting, but gets his photos in place of her own – all told against the backdrop of clashing ideologies: not just in 1956 but also in the present day, as Hungary lurches toward the hard right.

It was all there: the seeds of that story were sown in just a moment, in a chilly corner of the city park. That was perhaps four years ago and I had other fish to fry at the time: I made some notes, then fleshed things out some more in the summer of 2021. Even then, I devoted most of my time to other projects until, in February 2022, Russian troops invaded Ukraine. That made it personal, somehow: for the first time in decades there was war in Europe and with Putin the paranoid KGB agent turned sickly dictator in the Kremlin I found all the motivation I needed to finish my story of the Hungarian Revolution.

I don’t want to live under the jackboot of the Soviet Reunion and I don’t think there are many in Eastern Europe with fond memories of those times… so here’s Budapest.