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Budapest: A History of Grandeur and Catastrophe
Budapest today is a palimpsest of its history and partially crystallized present. Its earlier history is best seen on the Castle Hill of Buda, the seat of Hungarian royal power since the beginning in the 13th Century. This peaked in the glory years of King Matthias' reign in the second half of the 15th Century, when Buda was one of the largest and wealthiest cities of Europe. The Ottoman conquest that followed a generation later was a catastrophe whose effect would last two centuries. However when the new Castle Hill of Buda arose, it became a version of Baroque central Europe, controlled by Imperial Vienna. Pest, on the opposite banks of the Danube, is a symbol of the grandeur of the late 19th Century metropolis. Elaborate, historicist buildings and monuments first inhabited by the members of the rising bourgeoisie that had achieved prosperity in the booming Budapest around the year 1900. This era still largely defines the visual appearance of the central city. Nearly half a century later Fascism, and then forty years of Communism, again produced economic dislocation and social tumult in the lives of the people. This is best shown through descriptions of the fate of individual families in Budapest. Since 1990 the metropolis and its people have gone through a frenzied transition for which there was no authoritarian socialist economy to volatile capitalism and democracy. The story of the key players and groups in this transition make this tumultuous process particularly vivid. Today Budapest is a city whose role in Europe is still being crystallized. However, inventive entrepreneurs and creative artists are making the city a more and more vibrant home for its citizens and a favoured destination for a rapidly increasing flow of visitors.
- GenresHistoryNonfictionHungary
333 pages, Kindle Edition
First published July 31, 2015
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April 28, 2024
Budapest is “a fairy-tale city,” as a friend from the United States of America remarked when she was visiting me and my wife in Hungary back in 2011. With its profusion of various old architectural styles that somehow cohere in a harmonious whole, Budapest certainly fits our friend’s description of the city. At the same time, that beautiful city on both banks of the Danube River has seen more than its share of trouble and trauma. How appropriate, therefore, that Joe Hajdu gave his 2018 book about the city the title Budapest: A History of Grandeur and Catastrophe.
The Hungarian-born Hajdu is a cultural geographer at Deakin University in Melbourne, and his books include studies of cultural geography in Australia and Germany – all of which gives him a helpful insider-outsider perspective on the land of his birth. Throughout Budapest: A History of Grandeur and Catastrophe, Hajdu explains how the geography of the city – the arrangement of how people live, work, worship, make laws, and pursue cultural and leisure activities – reflects the city’s vivid and often turbulent history.
One of the very first things that a first-time visitor to Budapest learns is that Budapest began as two separate cities – Buda on the hills west of the Danube, and Pest on the flatlands east of the river. Going back to medieval and early modern history, Hajdu reflects that
At the beginning of the 16th Century, Buda was a bustling, prosperous town with about 13-15,000 people. This made it one of the largest towns of medieval Europe. However, as has happened quite frequently in the history of Hungary, a golden age was quickly followed by catastrophe. In the 16th Century, it was the threat from the Ottoman Turks. (p. 24)
Almost any Hungarian can sum up for you this disastrous period from Hungary’s history, as Hajdu does here:
The catastrophe for Hungary occurred in 1526 at the Battle of Mohács. In a battle which lasted only an hour and a half, the Hungarian army was decimated by the Ottoman forces led by Sultan Suleiman I. King Louis II of Hungary died on the battlefield, and what was left of his army collapsed. Since then, Hungarians refer to any great disaster as "This has been our Mohács". (p. 24)
Hajdu does not mention some details that make the story even worse – for instance, the way “Suleiman the Magnificent” oversaw the murders of more than 2,000 unarmed and surrendered prisoners in the battle’s aftermath – but he captures well the trauma that Mohács still represents for Hungarians of today.
Some happier history relates to the nationalist revival of Hungarian culture that occurred in the late 18th and 19th century. Hajdu aptly states that “This phase of the city’s life and development is linked more than anything else to the views and work of one person, Count István Széchényi (1791-1860)” (p. 29). Statesman, engineer, inventor, and author, Széchényi was a true polymath. In the breadth of his talents, and in his belief that he needed to use his wealth, vision, and influence to advance the greater good, Széchényi in Hungary reminds me of Benjamin Franklin here in the U.S.A. The city’s lasting gratitude to this founding father can be seen in the fact that “Budapest today has ten streets, four roads, three squares, one promenade, one public thermal baths, and, last but not least, one bridge, named after István Széchényi” (p. 32).
Among Széchényi’s greatest contributions to the life of his country was the Széchényi Chain Bridge, the first bridge that spanned the Danube and connected Buda with Pest. Construction began in 1840. During Hungary’s 1848 revolution against Austrian rule, the commander of Austria’s Hapsburg forces sought to blow up the not-yet-completed bridge; the attempt failed, and the colonel himself was killed in explosion! One year later, in the wake of the quashing of the revolution, what followed was an important moment that Hungarians on both sides of the Danube had long awaited: “Finally, on the 20 November 1849 the Széchényi Chain Bridge was opened to traffic. Buda and Pest had finally been linked on a permanent basis” (p. 31) – starting the progression from Buda and Pest, to Buda-Pest, to Budapest.
Hajdu then proceeds forward to what is often seen within Hungary as a high point of Hungarian history – the time of the Dual Monarchy. Nineteen years after the failure of the Hungarian Revolution against Austrian rule, a new way was found of making Hungary a willing partner in Austria’s empire, rather than an occupied enemy. “In 1867, a Compromise was signed that was less than independence for Hungary, but converted the Empire into a dual Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and gave Hungary autonomy in all matters except foreign affairs, defence, and finance” (p. 42).
As he does throughout this book, Hajdu focuses on the link between architecture and history, suggesting that two major development projects symbolize the 1870-1914 “Dual Monarchy” period of confident growth and development within Hungary generally and Budapest specifically. “The two in question are the Nágykörút or Grand Boulevard and the key arterial that radiates from it: Andrássy út (road)” (p. 50). Budapest residents and visitors alike would no doubt agree that “The Grand Boulevard is arguably the best preserved example of the European boulevard of the late 19th Century” (p. 51).
And I was particularly glad to see Hajdu mention that “One of the most famous Budapest cafés was on the Grand Boulevard. It is at 9-11 Erszébet körút [Elizabeth Street], as the central stretch of the Grand Boulevard is called, and is the New York Palace and Coffee House” (p. 55). The Café New York, in the early 20th century, was a cutting-edge hangout for intellectuals and writers like playwright Ferenc Molnár; today, it provides an evocative look back at the Budapest and the Hungary of an earlier time.
But the good times of the “Dual Monarchy” did not last. Austria-Hungary, with the German and Ottoman empires, was a participant in the Central Powers alliance that started, and lost, the First World War. Two years after the war’s end, in 1920, the Treaty of Trianon sundered Hungary of two thirds of its pre-war territory – an event that still looms large in Hungarians’ national memory. And two decades after that, Hungarian leaders still hoping for the return of their “stolen” territory allied with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime – a decision that eventually brought all the horrors of the Holocaust to Hungary. Those passages of Budapest: A History of Grandeur and Catastrophe in which Hajdu relates Budapest’s historic Dohány Street Synagogue (the largest synagogue in Europe, and the second largest on Earth) to the ordeal of the Jewish people of Budapest and Hungary are among the most moving in the book.
Readers with an interest in Cold War history may find themselves focusing on Chapter 5, “Budapest After 1945: Tyranny and Social Cleansing.” Hajdu starts the chapter with a description of the Liberation Monument on Gellért Hill, high above the city on the Buda side. The monument was built by the Soviets, to commemorate the victory over Nazi Germany. Yet the “victory” is a complicated one, for Hungarians, because the defeat of the Nazi regime was followed in short order by the Soviets’ occupation of Hungary and imposition of a Hungarian communist regime loyal to Moscow. The Hungarians even rose up against Soviet occupation, in 1956, in a people’s revolution that was cruelly put down by the Red Army. Small wonder, then, that, as Hajdu points out, the 40-metre-tall monument, topped by a statue of a woman raising the palm of victory, has been “given the nickname by Budapest wits, Woman Holding a Dead Fish.”
One of my favorite sites in Budapest, well described by Hajdu, provides an illustration of how things have changed in Budapest, and in Hungary, since the end of the Cold War, particularly with regard to the communist statues and monuments that used to dominate the Budapest cityscape:
While the Woman with Dead Fish has remained in her place, the rest of the statuary has been removed and placed into a newly created Statue Park on the southwest edge of Budapest. Other statues, busts, and plaques of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Béla Kun were also removed from the streets and collected in this park. There they are now displayed to a steady flow of tourists who want to learn something of this recently ended traumatic and revolutionary phase of Hungarian history. (p. 100)
The park is now called Szoborpark, or “Memento Park,” and it provides for a fascinating historical tableau.
Budapest: A History of Grandeur and Catastrophe is well-illustrated with photographs, both black-and-white and colour. Two images on page 155 particularly stood out to me. One was a colour digital image of Váci utca (Vaci Street), a pedestrian street just east of the Danube in Pest; Hajdu points out, accurately, that “Since the late 18th century, the shopping heart of Budapest has been the narrow Váci utca” (p. 237). The short dresses on the young women in front of the Anna café, and the T-shirts on the young men eyeing the young women from the Planet Café across the street, show clearly enough that it is summertime and peak tourist season.
The other is of the thermal baths at the Gellért Hotel – specifically the baths’ “Colonnaded art nouveau indoor pool”, with Eastern-looking white columns framing the deep blue of the pool water. This photo reminded me of happy stays at the Gellért, a hotel that is so old-school (it was one of the models for the title resort in the movie The Grand Budapest Hotel) that it is forever new.
I also liked the details that Hajdu provided regarding the end of communism in Hungary in 1989:
Perhaps the most symbolic act occurred on the 23rd of October 1989. A crowd had gathered on the square outside the Houses of Parliament to bear witness to an act loaded with meaning: punctually at 6pm the brightly-lit red star on top of the dome of Parliament House went dark. After glowing uninterruptedly for nearly thirty-three years, and so being visible from practically anywhere along the Danube, on this day and at precisely this hour, its power supply was turned off. The day on which this occurred was the 33rd anniversary of the 1956 Revolution. (pp. 200-01)
Hajdu then leads us into the present, pointing out that “Budapest today is a vibrant city – a city that is changing rapidly and making good use of its attractive urban setting, historic fabric, and lively social, gastronomic, and cultural scene” (p. 251). At the same time, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who leads the conservative Fidesz political party and has served as prime minister of Hungary since 2010, has garnered a reputation for heavy-handed and even authoritarian approaches to governance.
Such is the reputation that Orbán already had when I lived in Hungary in 2011. At the time of his accession to power, the historic Crown of King Saint Stephen (Hungary’s first Christian king, 975-1038) had been moved from Saint Stephen’s Basilica to the Houses of Parliament; and a popular joke of the time was that the king's crown had been moved so Orbán could take it out of its case and walk through the Parliament building at night wearing it. But I had not heard of Orbán controversies like one relating to
the creation of a new museum precinct near the northern end of Andrássy út, on the edge of the City Park. The government announcement of this huge project in June 2012 startled the thinking citizens of Budapest….The Hungarian government, not to mention the Budapest Metropolitan Authority, are in no position to finance such a huge project on their own. Not surprisingly, it quickly became controversial. Critics have accused the Orbán government of ‘gigantomania.’ Why build a huge complex when there are already a plethora of museums in Budapest, [and when] furthermore they have to survive on very tight budgets? (p. 254).
In short, history in Budapest goes on, as dynamic as ever, and Hajdu’s Budapest: A History of Grandeur and Catastrophe provides a fine introduction to that history.
The Hungarian-born Hajdu is a cultural geographer at Deakin University in Melbourne, and his books include studies of cultural geography in Australia and Germany – all of which gives him a helpful insider-outsider perspective on the land of his birth. Throughout Budapest: A History of Grandeur and Catastrophe, Hajdu explains how the geography of the city – the arrangement of how people live, work, worship, make laws, and pursue cultural and leisure activities – reflects the city’s vivid and often turbulent history.
One of the very first things that a first-time visitor to Budapest learns is that Budapest began as two separate cities – Buda on the hills west of the Danube, and Pest on the flatlands east of the river. Going back to medieval and early modern history, Hajdu reflects that
At the beginning of the 16th Century, Buda was a bustling, prosperous town with about 13-15,000 people. This made it one of the largest towns of medieval Europe. However, as has happened quite frequently in the history of Hungary, a golden age was quickly followed by catastrophe. In the 16th Century, it was the threat from the Ottoman Turks. (p. 24)
Almost any Hungarian can sum up for you this disastrous period from Hungary’s history, as Hajdu does here:
The catastrophe for Hungary occurred in 1526 at the Battle of Mohács. In a battle which lasted only an hour and a half, the Hungarian army was decimated by the Ottoman forces led by Sultan Suleiman I. King Louis II of Hungary died on the battlefield, and what was left of his army collapsed. Since then, Hungarians refer to any great disaster as "This has been our Mohács". (p. 24)
Hajdu does not mention some details that make the story even worse – for instance, the way “Suleiman the Magnificent” oversaw the murders of more than 2,000 unarmed and surrendered prisoners in the battle’s aftermath – but he captures well the trauma that Mohács still represents for Hungarians of today.
Some happier history relates to the nationalist revival of Hungarian culture that occurred in the late 18th and 19th century. Hajdu aptly states that “This phase of the city’s life and development is linked more than anything else to the views and work of one person, Count István Széchényi (1791-1860)” (p. 29). Statesman, engineer, inventor, and author, Széchényi was a true polymath. In the breadth of his talents, and in his belief that he needed to use his wealth, vision, and influence to advance the greater good, Széchényi in Hungary reminds me of Benjamin Franklin here in the U.S.A. The city’s lasting gratitude to this founding father can be seen in the fact that “Budapest today has ten streets, four roads, three squares, one promenade, one public thermal baths, and, last but not least, one bridge, named after István Széchényi” (p. 32).
Among Széchényi’s greatest contributions to the life of his country was the Széchényi Chain Bridge, the first bridge that spanned the Danube and connected Buda with Pest. Construction began in 1840. During Hungary’s 1848 revolution against Austrian rule, the commander of Austria’s Hapsburg forces sought to blow up the not-yet-completed bridge; the attempt failed, and the colonel himself was killed in explosion! One year later, in the wake of the quashing of the revolution, what followed was an important moment that Hungarians on both sides of the Danube had long awaited: “Finally, on the 20 November 1849 the Széchényi Chain Bridge was opened to traffic. Buda and Pest had finally been linked on a permanent basis” (p. 31) – starting the progression from Buda and Pest, to Buda-Pest, to Budapest.
Hajdu then proceeds forward to what is often seen within Hungary as a high point of Hungarian history – the time of the Dual Monarchy. Nineteen years after the failure of the Hungarian Revolution against Austrian rule, a new way was found of making Hungary a willing partner in Austria’s empire, rather than an occupied enemy. “In 1867, a Compromise was signed that was less than independence for Hungary, but converted the Empire into a dual Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and gave Hungary autonomy in all matters except foreign affairs, defence, and finance” (p. 42).
As he does throughout this book, Hajdu focuses on the link between architecture and history, suggesting that two major development projects symbolize the 1870-1914 “Dual Monarchy” period of confident growth and development within Hungary generally and Budapest specifically. “The two in question are the Nágykörút or Grand Boulevard and the key arterial that radiates from it: Andrássy út (road)” (p. 50). Budapest residents and visitors alike would no doubt agree that “The Grand Boulevard is arguably the best preserved example of the European boulevard of the late 19th Century” (p. 51).
And I was particularly glad to see Hajdu mention that “One of the most famous Budapest cafés was on the Grand Boulevard. It is at 9-11 Erszébet körút [Elizabeth Street], as the central stretch of the Grand Boulevard is called, and is the New York Palace and Coffee House” (p. 55). The Café New York, in the early 20th century, was a cutting-edge hangout for intellectuals and writers like playwright Ferenc Molnár; today, it provides an evocative look back at the Budapest and the Hungary of an earlier time.
But the good times of the “Dual Monarchy” did not last. Austria-Hungary, with the German and Ottoman empires, was a participant in the Central Powers alliance that started, and lost, the First World War. Two years after the war’s end, in 1920, the Treaty of Trianon sundered Hungary of two thirds of its pre-war territory – an event that still looms large in Hungarians’ national memory. And two decades after that, Hungarian leaders still hoping for the return of their “stolen” territory allied with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime – a decision that eventually brought all the horrors of the Holocaust to Hungary. Those passages of Budapest: A History of Grandeur and Catastrophe in which Hajdu relates Budapest’s historic Dohány Street Synagogue (the largest synagogue in Europe, and the second largest on Earth) to the ordeal of the Jewish people of Budapest and Hungary are among the most moving in the book.
Readers with an interest in Cold War history may find themselves focusing on Chapter 5, “Budapest After 1945: Tyranny and Social Cleansing.” Hajdu starts the chapter with a description of the Liberation Monument on Gellért Hill, high above the city on the Buda side. The monument was built by the Soviets, to commemorate the victory over Nazi Germany. Yet the “victory” is a complicated one, for Hungarians, because the defeat of the Nazi regime was followed in short order by the Soviets’ occupation of Hungary and imposition of a Hungarian communist regime loyal to Moscow. The Hungarians even rose up against Soviet occupation, in 1956, in a people’s revolution that was cruelly put down by the Red Army. Small wonder, then, that, as Hajdu points out, the 40-metre-tall monument, topped by a statue of a woman raising the palm of victory, has been “given the nickname by Budapest wits, Woman Holding a Dead Fish.”
One of my favorite sites in Budapest, well described by Hajdu, provides an illustration of how things have changed in Budapest, and in Hungary, since the end of the Cold War, particularly with regard to the communist statues and monuments that used to dominate the Budapest cityscape:
While the Woman with Dead Fish has remained in her place, the rest of the statuary has been removed and placed into a newly created Statue Park on the southwest edge of Budapest. Other statues, busts, and plaques of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Béla Kun were also removed from the streets and collected in this park. There they are now displayed to a steady flow of tourists who want to learn something of this recently ended traumatic and revolutionary phase of Hungarian history. (p. 100)
The park is now called Szoborpark, or “Memento Park,” and it provides for a fascinating historical tableau.
Budapest: A History of Grandeur and Catastrophe is well-illustrated with photographs, both black-and-white and colour. Two images on page 155 particularly stood out to me. One was a colour digital image of Váci utca (Vaci Street), a pedestrian street just east of the Danube in Pest; Hajdu points out, accurately, that “Since the late 18th century, the shopping heart of Budapest has been the narrow Váci utca” (p. 237). The short dresses on the young women in front of the Anna café, and the T-shirts on the young men eyeing the young women from the Planet Café across the street, show clearly enough that it is summertime and peak tourist season.
The other is of the thermal baths at the Gellért Hotel – specifically the baths’ “Colonnaded art nouveau indoor pool”, with Eastern-looking white columns framing the deep blue of the pool water. This photo reminded me of happy stays at the Gellért, a hotel that is so old-school (it was one of the models for the title resort in the movie The Grand Budapest Hotel) that it is forever new.
I also liked the details that Hajdu provided regarding the end of communism in Hungary in 1989:
Perhaps the most symbolic act occurred on the 23rd of October 1989. A crowd had gathered on the square outside the Houses of Parliament to bear witness to an act loaded with meaning: punctually at 6pm the brightly-lit red star on top of the dome of Parliament House went dark. After glowing uninterruptedly for nearly thirty-three years, and so being visible from practically anywhere along the Danube, on this day and at precisely this hour, its power supply was turned off. The day on which this occurred was the 33rd anniversary of the 1956 Revolution. (pp. 200-01)
Hajdu then leads us into the present, pointing out that “Budapest today is a vibrant city – a city that is changing rapidly and making good use of its attractive urban setting, historic fabric, and lively social, gastronomic, and cultural scene” (p. 251). At the same time, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who leads the conservative Fidesz political party and has served as prime minister of Hungary since 2010, has garnered a reputation for heavy-handed and even authoritarian approaches to governance.
Such is the reputation that Orbán already had when I lived in Hungary in 2011. At the time of his accession to power, the historic Crown of King Saint Stephen (Hungary’s first Christian king, 975-1038) had been moved from Saint Stephen’s Basilica to the Houses of Parliament; and a popular joke of the time was that the king's crown had been moved so Orbán could take it out of its case and walk through the Parliament building at night wearing it. But I had not heard of Orbán controversies like one relating to
the creation of a new museum precinct near the northern end of Andrássy út, on the edge of the City Park. The government announcement of this huge project in June 2012 startled the thinking citizens of Budapest….The Hungarian government, not to mention the Budapest Metropolitan Authority, are in no position to finance such a huge project on their own. Not surprisingly, it quickly became controversial. Critics have accused the Orbán government of ‘gigantomania.’ Why build a huge complex when there are already a plethora of museums in Budapest, [and when] furthermore they have to survive on very tight budgets? (p. 254).
In short, history in Budapest goes on, as dynamic as ever, and Hajdu’s Budapest: A History of Grandeur and Catastrophe provides a fine introduction to that history.
June 9, 2024
A good entry level summary for those with no prior knowledge of Budapest.
August 16, 2018
Excellent introduction to Budapest
I read this book before my first visit to Budapest and was very glad I did. Hajdu has a very easy style about his writing with a nice light humour and provides an excellent introduction to contemporary Budapest. Not only was I able to use this book as an alternative guide book but it gave insights into how the city developed physically, politically and culturally, which were easily digested. All in all I’d recommend this book for anyone planning to visit or who wants a good overview of how and why Budapest became the fascinating city it is.
I read this book before my first visit to Budapest and was very glad I did. Hajdu has a very easy style about his writing with a nice light humour and provides an excellent introduction to contemporary Budapest. Not only was I able to use this book as an alternative guide book but it gave insights into how the city developed physically, politically and culturally, which were easily digested. All in all I’d recommend this book for anyone planning to visit or who wants a good overview of how and why Budapest became the fascinating city it is.
December 8, 2019
I consider myself fairly well read on history of Budapest and Hungary and so I was a little worried that this book might seem like I was going over ground I’d already covered.
I was pleasantly surprised to find this book took a more contemporary take on the history of Budapest. It focussed more on nineteenth and twentieth century history and brings things right up to date.
I was pleasantly surprised to find this book took a more contemporary take on the history of Budapest. It focussed more on nineteenth and twentieth century history and brings things right up to date.
June 12, 2024
Most of this book is quite interesting. Sometimes it reads like a grand advertisement for the Budapest tourist association and sometimes like a political tract disguised as a history.
What is irritating are the selective use of historical and contemporary sources to, at times, make it seem the experience of top 10% of the population reflects all that needs to be said. The author mentions the ordinary people a number of times but far outweighing this demographic is his concentration on the rich and famous.
The book was written 10 years ago and given political line consistently espoused throughout, what he would say about Budapest, Victor Orban and Jobbick today.
What is irritating are the selective use of historical and contemporary sources to, at times, make it seem the experience of top 10% of the population reflects all that needs to be said. The author mentions the ordinary people a number of times but far outweighing this demographic is his concentration on the rich and famous.
The book was written 10 years ago and given political line consistently espoused throughout, what he would say about Budapest, Victor Orban and Jobbick today.
September 24, 2022
An informative, well written collection of essays covering Budapest's history, starting a couple of centuries ago. One of the best features -- citations from the memoirs of the city's residents living through that history. Look up from the book -- could it be they stood up there, behind the window of the building in front of you, watching the German or Soviet tanks roll by?
July 25, 2024
Before a visit to Budapest, this is a good book to lay out the geography, key points, and a high-level history of the city. I think it's also good to follow up a visit with another read to provide a different point of view.
May 11, 2018
A fine overview of the important aspects of Budapest's history and why its current political situation is so fraught.
April 18, 2019
A great book to read before or after a trip to this historic city. Enhanced my visit greatly.
March 5, 2023
Pleasant and easy read for anyone who has found themselves particularly taken by the city and interested in its history.
June 15, 2020
The first half of this book was well thought and interesting in its general history of Budapest, but the second half was sprawling and rambling, even though it focused very narrowly on different aspects of life in Budapest since 1990.
May 8, 2023
Book review
This was a good history of Buda and Pest. My bride and I will be visiting Budapest this October. I think a book about the current events will be helpful.
This was a good history of Buda and Pest. My bride and I will be visiting Budapest this October. I think a book about the current events will be helpful.
May 8, 2016
Worth reading because it informs about important events in Budapest & Hungarian history from a personified perspective. Lots of information cannot be found online or wikipedia so definietly a must read for everybody that does not or/and cannot read history books in Hungarian.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews