SQUARE OF FREEDOM (SZABADSÁG TÉR)

The sinister Neugebäude prison, where Lajos Batthyány, president of the first Hungarian government in 1848, was executed, was destroyed in the last years of the 19th century. To emphasize the break with the Habsburg oppression, a new square was created with the symbolic name of Freedom. In the same patriotic spirit, the Stock Exchange and the National Bank were built in order to affirm the advent of a new political era. The old stock exchange housed the Hungarian public television until 2009. On the same square, the Art Nouveau palace of the American Embassy housed Cardinal Mindszenty between 1956 and 1971. The churchman, sentenced in a Stalinist trial to life imprisonment, joined Budapest and the insurgents in 1956. Unable to flee in time from the crushing of the revolution by the Soviets, he found refuge in the American embassy where he stayed until 1971 before moving to Vienna. In the center of the square, a Soviet obelisk from 1946 has been preserved. In 2014, the statuary of the square was enriched by a highly controversial monument "commemorating" the victims of the German occupation in Hungary (A német megszállás áldozatainak emlékműve). Hungary (Archangel Gabriel) is attacked by a Nazi eagle, even though the role of Magyar leaders in World War II was more than murky. Opposite, activists erected a counter-monument recalling the reality of Jewish deportations.