Premium: Budapest, Vienna & Prague

The capital of Hungary, Budapest was formed by the unification of two cities, Buda and Pest, separated by the Danube River. This sparkling eastern European capital has culture, nightlife, gambling, folk art and fine cuisine to offer. More than 4 million tourists each year are drawn by such attractions as the Buda Castle quarter, over 200 museums, around 80 geothermal springs, the largest synagogue in Europe and more.

Prague, the capitol of the Czech Republic and Stredocesky (Central Bohemia), is a city of history unlike any other major European city. Unscathed by bombing during World War II, many of its old buildings stand as testimony to the events that occurred here.

How is it that Vienna’s mood manages to be at once so sanguinary and so sanguine? Somehow the city’s fondness for the morbid and the bizarre never seems at odds with its sunny stability. Rather, all Vienna works the way its graveyards and its Graben work. The order here is rich, organic, and complex. Death takes its place alongside life, the old alongside the new, the eccentric alongside the conventional, the mad alongside the sane.

Even the city’s geography is orderly in an organic, inspiriting way. Vienna is a series of concentric circles, or, more accurately, half circles, rippling outward from its center in the inner town (where Vienna began as the ancient Roman camp of Vindobona) to the Vienna Woods themselves, which are the ultimate foothills and fingerlings of the Alps. At the nucleus, the first district, you find this vigorous hodgepodge of old and new, sublimity and grotesquerie, urbanity and coziness. Around it, in a protective and officious circle, there is the Ringstrasse, a collection of public and private buildings, all planned nearly simultaneously (in the mid nineteenth century) on an enormous scale. The buildings are charmless but imposing, and they were all designed as though they were theatrical sets, with an eye to the illustrious past: fake Renaissance for the university, fake early Baroque for the Burgtheater (the Baroque being the period when common-
ers joined with the gentry in flocking to the theater), fake Gothic for the Votive Church and the Town Hall (since the medieval commune represented the source of Viennese government), fake Greek for the democratic institution of Parliament. At once expansive and forbidding, the Ringstrasse hems in the vibrant inner town and formalizes it. It
was built where the fortress walls of Vienna once stood, and even today it acts as a sort of wall, inside which the city carries on with the appropriate metropolitan bustle, and outside which Vienna can sprawl and relax and indulge itself. Small wonder that the next ring beyond the Ringstrasse, the Gurtel, is best known as the circle where streetwalkers ply their trade.

Beyond Gurtel, Vienna fans out into neighborhoods, pleasant, almost bucolic districts that retain the character of their past lives as quaint Austrian villages. There are workers’ regions (including the beautiful and still-functioning Karl Marx-Hof housing project, built during the utopian twenties, when the city was often referred to as Red Vienna) and posh residential areas. Good mansion viewing can be had in the nineteenth district, where you can and should visit the Gey-muller-Schlossel. Although its clock collection is its gratest draw, the Geymuller-Schlossel is one of Vienn’a most delicious repositories of Biedermeier furniture, the igenious and beautiful stuff made to amuse the upper middle class during the early nineteenth century.