Szechenyi Baths, Budapest ... spas are a part of the city's culture..Credit: Holger Leue / Lonely Planet
Ray Cassin is flanked by nymphs and Magyar warriors in the dignified bath-houses and boulevards of Budapest.
The air temperature is a teeth-chattering 1 degree and there's nothing I want more than a plunge in the pool. This is Budapest in the depths of winter, where Australian notions of how the world works can be quickly and deliciously turned upside down. And there's no better place to invert them than in the grand neo-baroque pile of the Szechenyi spa, where for nearly a century Hungarians have been demonstrating how the simple pleasures of bathing mesh perfectly with exquisite high art.
As I stride briskly into the Szechenyi's open central courtyard with its three pools, however, I am not in the least distracted by the architectural splendour around me. Wearing only swimming trunks in weather like this focuses the mind and I'm intent on reaching the pillars of steam rising from the crescent-shaped pool nearest to me. This is the "thermal sitting pool", where the waters bubbling up from the spa's two mineral springs are a cosy 38 degrees.
I am enough attuned to the spirit of the place, however, not literally to take the plunge. One must descend into a thermal sitting pool. And I do, with as much nonchalant dignity as a body bristling with goosebumps will permit. But in the Szechenyi, just as on the beach at Bondi, Cottesloe or St Kilda, there will always be others displaying more dignified nonchalance. As I slip in, I pass a narrow platform in the pool bearing a chessboard with a game in process. The players stand on either side, chest deep in water, with spectators clustered around them. Chess in the pool? It's, er, cool. Especially in winter.
None of the locals displays any sensitivity to temperature. Most lean languidly against the outer edge of the sitting pool, which, despite its unpretentious name, is of Cecil B. DeMille dimensions. What are they chatting about so gravely as they gaze at the sculpted nymphs and tritons on plinths and balustrades around the courtyard? I'm beginning to wonder whether the ambience is overburdened with dignity when reassuring shrieks and splashes remind all present that this is, after all, a pool. The shrieker, a young French woman, and the splasher, her boyfriend, romp across our field of vision and some of the old men lining the pool incline their heads to follow the pair's antics. Human nymphs always trump stone ones.
But the Szechenyi is not only a haunt of old men, out-of-season Australian travellers and cavorting Gallic backpackers. Nor is the thermal sitting pool its only attraction. The spa has 18 pools. In summer the Szechenyi and its rivals, such as the equally grand Gellert spa across the Danube, are as packed as any Australian pool in a heatwave. But they offer much more: they are therapy centres and meeting places for leisured conversation, too.
In Budapest, spas are as much a part of the city's culture as its cafes and so it has been for two millenniums. Long before the Magyars arrived in the Danubian plain in the 9th century, the Romans had discovered the region's mineral springs - there are more than 100 in or near modern Budapest - and tapped them for their own bath houses.
If you want to know what it was like to meet and mingle in the public baths of ancient Rome, go to Budapest. Its spas also owe something to the influence of that other great bath-house culture, Turkey, though Hungarians are less keen to acknowledge the debt. For two centuries, from 1526 to 1718, they were subjects of the Ottoman empire and the memory is as raw as that of their more recent subjugation, as one of the former Soviet Union's Warsaw Pact satellites.
Today I'm not meeting or mingling, Roman style - I'm sampling one of the Szechenyi's very Roman, almost Turkish, experiences. I wade past the chess players - neither of whom has moved a piece since I first encountered them - and emerge from the water. Crossing the courtyard again, I climb the stairs to the hall containing the spa's covered pools; there are 15 of these, all much smaller than the one I just left but fully as warm and inviting. Each has only three or four occupants, all of them with the same languid expression as their compatriots outside. Whatever it is that bestows such composure cannot be the water, however, for somewhere ahead of me in this tiled warren is another round of shrieking and laughter. The nymph and her triton are apparently making for the same destination as I am.
When I pass the last pool I open a glass door and enter a large room with a central aisle and rows of wooden cubicles on either side. I hand my ticket to the attendant, who ushers me into a cubicle and tells me to wait. The shrieking has ceased. This section of the spa is as devoted to bodily pleasure as any other but it is pleasure of a business-like, no-nonsense kind. There is strictly no cavorting in the massage hall.
The cubicle door opens and the masseuse arrives. She is no nymph but she manages a smile as she tells me to lie face down on a table covered with towels. In the hammans of Istanbul I would receive a pummelling at this point - and an invigorating experience it can be. But it is not the Budapest way. The masseuse firmly but gently kneads my flesh, which, after soaking in the thermal sitting pool, is not at all resistant. Any remaining muscular stress disappears and I leave the cubicle feeling strung out in the nicest way. My Szechenyi experience is complete.
The Szechenyi is in Budapest's City Park, now quite a distance from the metropolitan boundary, but when the spa and its neighbours - Budapest's zoo and the opulent Gundel Restaurant - were built, the park more or less straddled the boundary. People came here at weekends to frolic in its faux rusticity, as Parisians did in the Bois de Boulogne. The comparison is not fanciful, for the park still marks an architectural periphery, even though the city has expanded beyond it.
On the far side of the park, buildings quickly acquire the uniform drabness that is a physical reminder of the communist decades after World War II. But on the city side, if you head towards the Danube on the main drag, Andrassy Avenue, it is like travelling along one of the grand boulevards of Paris; almost literally, in fact, because while Baron Haussmann was giving Paris its 19th-century makeover, some of his students and associates were lured to Budapest to do the same.
It is a city with the Haussmann look, in its street plan and its architecture, and the cliche that crops up in most travel guides - describing Budapest as the Paris of the East - has a point. The thriving spa and public-bath culture suggests it could also be dubbed the Istanbul of the West but if any guide book has ever conjured up that image, Hungary's authorities have successfully managed to suppress it.
So Paris of the East it is, with art nouveau architecture - or "secession", as the style is called in Hungary - everywhere as a reminder. And since the Hungarians shared the Habsburg monarchy with Austria, until World War I swept that empire away, there are affinities with Vienna, too. Art nouveau, jugendstil or secession; whatever you want to call it, the creations of the last great pan-European art movement are everywhere.
But no living city, least of all Budapest, is simply an art museum and no people, least of all the Hungarians, are merely the product of the cultural influences that have shaped them or the rulers imposed on them. Since the Magyar tribes first appeared on the Danubian plain 11 centuries ago, having wandered from no one knows where - probably the Ural Mountains - they have been conscious of their uniqueness in Europe, not least because they speak a language unlike any other on the continent.
I come face to face with these wanderers as I leave the City Park and walk into Heroes Square, the monument built to celebrate Hungary's millennium in 1896. Seven of them - great shaggy-bearded chieftains sculpted in larger-than-life bronze - form a protective semi-circle around the national war memorial. Further back, perched on another, taller semi-circle of stone, are 13 kings or warriors who either enlarged the national territory or led the Magyars in one of their many struggles against foreign rule. There are no nymphs here, either in stone or bronze, and today there are none in flesh and blood, either.
Many cities have this kind of martial monumentality and it can be oppressive to behold. But Heroes Square does not burden the spirit, though I'm not sure why as I gaze up at the colossi. Perhaps it is because the seven chieftains seem as inquisitive as they do ferocious. Heroes Square conveys a sense of possibility and thereby a sense of freedom, too. Others have also felt so: the monument won first prize at the World Exhibition in Paris in 1900 and together with Andrassy Avenue it is on UNESCO's list of World Heritage sites.
I have been here before, at a time when Budapest was littered with monuments that did not evoke the same sense of freedom. In 1983, the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet ascendancy were still the dominant political realities in eastern and central Europe and their tangible artistic expression was in the dreary, propagandist style known as socialist realism.
Some of the ugliest political statuary imaginable could be found in the squares and parks of Budapest and other cities of the Soviet Union and when the empire imploded after 1989 they were quickly torn down. Except, that is, in Budapest, where they were taken to Memento Park, on the edge of the city, to be preserved for posterity. If you are curious enough to want to see them, they are still here but you must pay for admission to the park. The display of bad communist art has become a thriving capitalist business.
I'm content to consign the communist past to memory and head further down Andrassy Avenue, past glittering shopfronts touting Gucci, Louis Vuitton and other purveyors of capitalist largesse. These have also mushroomed since 1989 and it is another Parisian touch; if it weren't for the street signs in Hungarian, which could never be confused with French, this might be the Avenue des Champs-Elysees.
Eventually I come to the Danube, the river uniting Buda and Pest, twin cities that have become one. On the Pest side, Hungary's imposing parliament building, with its grand dome, confronts the hill of Buda, the old royal castle district, across the river. Buda, with its narrow alleys and discreet shops and restaurants, deserves a day of exploration by itself. I decide to return but take time to linger on Fisherman's Bastion, a 19th-century neo-Gothic folly on the hill crest near the Church of St Matthias, where the kings of Hungary were crowned. Now, however, their coronation regalia, including Hungary's most revered symbol of nationhood, St Stephen's Crown, are on display in the parliament across the river.
There is no doubt a political message in that, too, but I have done enough musing about freedom and servitude for one day. But I haven't had enough of the past that Budapest wears so easily. It is not only a city of monuments and historic struggles but of music, food and good company and I shall finish my day in a part of the city where the best may be found in close proximity.
Across the river in Pest, heading up Andrassy Avenue again in the direction of Heroes Square, I approach the Opera House, another 19th-century gem in neo-Renaissance style. It is a little smaller than its counterpart in Vienna because the Habsburg emperors forbade their subjects to build anything that might eclipse the grand buildings of the imperial capital. The Budapest Opera House has had the last laugh, though: the ticket prices are amazingly modest by European or Australian standards. Forty euros ($55) buys a seat in the stalls a few rows from the stage and as I settle back to await the State Opera Ballet's performance of that winter standard The Nutcracker, I can hear half the languages of Europe. People come to Budapest to enjoy the opera and ballet because in few other European cities can such fine music be heard so cheaply.
Later I'll dine with friends in the Callas Restaurant, next door to the opera, where Hungary's rich and unique cuisine can be savoured to the strains of gypsy music. But for the moment I'm immersed in the strains of Tchaikovsky's ballet music. There are nymphs everywhere.
Ray Cassin travelled courtesy of Qatar Airways and the Hungarian National Tourist Office.
FAST FACTS
Getting there
Qatar Airways has a fare to Budapest from Melbourne and Sydney for about $1990 low-season return, including tax — flying to Doha (about 14hr), then Budapest (6hr). Sydney passengers fly Jetstar or Virgin Blue to Melbourne to connect.
Staying there
Kempinski Hotel Corvinus, on Erzsebet Square, has a perfect location, a short walk from the Danube and Cafe Gerbeaud. Rooms cost from €299 ($410), suites from €629; kempinski.com.
Buda Castle Hotel is a small, quiet hotel in a 15th-century building and an excellent base for exploring the Buda side of the river. Rooms cost from €95; at Uri utca 39; budacastlehotelbudapest.com.
Backpack Guesthouse has dormitory beds from 9000 forints ($46) or share a yurt in the garden for 2500 forints. At XI Takacs Menyhert utca 33, in Buda; backpackbudapest.hu.
Touring there
Admission to the Szechenyi Bath and Spa costs 2600 forints and you get a 200 forint refund on daylight entry if you leave within two hours. The Opera, Heroes Square and the Szechenyi are all easily accessible from Metro line 1, which runs the length of Andrassy Avenue. The spas are open all year and so are most museums.
The Tourism Office of Budapest provides a useful free sightseeing guide in English with maps; budapestinfo.hu. The city's public transport system is excellent: trains on the Metro run every two minutes at peak hours and every 10 minutes late at night. There are connecting buses and trams.
The state opera takes a break at the height of summer (July and August). The most expensive seats are only €63.
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