23 October 1956: where the revolution began, hour by hour
On 23 October Hungary remembers the day in 1956 when a student march turned into a revolution. Most of what happened that day can still be walked. Here is the day in places, from a university lecture hall to a fallen statue.
The day before: a lecture hall in Buda
On the afternoon of 22 October about 2,000 students packed the main hall of the Technical University (BME), the building on the Buda bank designed by Alajos Hauszmann and finished in 1906. The meeting had been called by the official communist youth organisation, but it slipped out of its hands. The demands moved from study matters to national politics and ended as a list of 16 points. That evening and night they went out as leaflets.
Late morning to 3 p.m.: the march is banned, then allowed
By noon on 23 October some 10,000–15,000 students had gathered. Just before 1 p.m. the march was banned; at 2:30 p.m. the ban was lifted. The students set off from the university along the upper embankment towards Bem tér, while a second march started from the Petőfi statue in Pest.
Afternoon: Bem tér, a Polish general for a Polish example
Why a statue of Józef Bem? He was a Polish general who fought for Hungary in 1848–49, and that week Hungarians were watching Poland. On 19 October Khrushchev had flown to Warsaw but had to accept the reformer Gomułka as party leader. "Follow the Polish example" was the idea of the day, and the crowd chanted "Lengyel–magyar egyet akar" (Poles and Hungarians want the same). Workers joined the students. The speeches were mostly inaudible; people sang the national anthem; no shot was fired. The statue stands about 200 metres from the Buda end of Margaret Bridge, and when it ended, as one witness put it, nobody wanted to go home.
Evening: Kossuth tér
From Bem tér many crossed Margaret Bridge to the square in front of Parliament. The most quoted estimate is 200,000 people (others say anything from 100,000 to 250,000), and they waited for about four hours. The party leader Ernő Gerő gave a short, hard radio speech that only angered people. Later Imre Nagy, the reform communist they had been calling for, spoke to the crowd. When he began with "Comrades!" he was booed.
Evening: the Radio on Bródy Sándor utca
Another crowd, about three quarters of them students, went to the radio headquarters behind the National Museum to have the 16 points read on air. Around 9 p.m. tear gas and shooting began, and the first civilians were wounded between 9:15 and 9:30. Who fired first is still disputed. This was the first major armed clash in Budapest. A plaque on the building remembers the first to die there, an 18-year-old.
9:30 p.m.: Stalin falls
Out by the City Park, an eight-metre bronze Stalin had stood on an equally tall stone base since 1951. Workers from a tractor factory had brought three tractors; steel cables snapped; someone fetched cutting torches. Witnesses remember a cheerful crowd and police who had been told not to intervene. By half past nine the cutting was done and a truck pulled the statue down. It was dragged to Blaha Lujza tér and broken up for souvenirs. Only the boots stayed on the plinth, and for a while people called the place "Boot Square". The statue itself is long gone. On its site, at the edge of the City Park on Dózsa György út, stands the 1956 Memorial, unveiled for the 50th anniversary in 2006: a wedge of rusted steel columns that close into a single polished steel point, the crowd becoming one. Across the road is the new building of the Museum of Ethnography, opened in 2022.
The days after: from hope to defeat
During the night the Kilián barracks on Üllői út was broken into for weapons, and the alleys around the Corvin cinema opposite became the strongest base of the armed fighters: 40–50 on 25 October, around 1,000 a few days later. On 25 October shots fired into the crowd on Kossuth tér killed, by recent research, 60 to 100 people. For a few days it looked as if the revolution had won. A ceasefire came on 28 October, Soviet troops pulled out of Budapest, and on 1 November Imre Nagy announced that Hungary would leave the Warsaw Pact and become neutral. At dawn on 4 November Soviet tanks came back to the city in force. Fighting went on for days in Pest, at Corvin köz, the Kilián barracks and Széna tér, but by the middle of November the armed resistance was over. The workers' councils held out longer with strikes, and on 4 December thousands of women marched silently to Heroes' Square with flowers.
The shock: reprisals and exile
The defeat was followed by flight. In the weeks after 4 November about 200,000 people left Hungary, most of them across the Austrian border, among them many of the young people who had fought. Those who stayed faced the reprisals. Imre Nagy left the Yugoslav embassy, where he had taken refuge, with a promise of safe conduct; he was arrested at once and taken to Romania. In June 1958 he was tried in secret in Budapest and hanged on 16 June, together with Pál Maléter and the journalist Miklós Gimes. Tens of thousands of people were imprisoned or interned, and more than 200 were executed for their part in 1956; the book our walk is based on cites a study of 232 of them. Their bodies were buried in unmarked graves, often under false names, in plot 301 of the Rákoskeresztúr cemetery. Their families were not told where. Nagy's remains were put there in 1961, face down.
The Kádár years: a quiet deal
The man Moscow installed on 4 November, the party leader Kádár, ruled Hungary for the next 32 years. The first years were hard, and his regime wanted to show it was in control: on 1 May 1957 it staged a huge rally on the same Heroes' Square. In 1963 a general amnesty released most of the 1956 prisoners, and slowly a different deal took shape. Hungarians got a little more than their neighbours in the Eastern bloc: more food and consumer goods, small private businesses and, every few years, a trip to the West. People came to call it "goulash communism". The price was silence. Officially 1956 was a "counter-revolution": it could not be commemorated, and its dead could not be visited.
1989: the reburial
By the late 1980s the economy was in debt and the system was tired. Kádár was removed as party leader in 1988, and in early 1989 the reform communist Imre Pozsgay publicly called 1956 a "popular uprising" instead of a counter-revolution. That word broke a 33-year taboo. On 16 June 1989, 31 years to the day after the executions, Imre Nagy and his fellow martyrs were given a public funeral on Heroes' Square, with six coffins on the steps of the Műcsarnok: five for the executed leaders and a sixth, empty, for all the unknown dead of 1956. Hungarian television broadcast the whole ceremony live. In the most remembered speech, a young Viktor Orbán, speaking for the new youth movements, demanded that Soviet troops leave Hungary. The dead were then reburied in plot 301, now marked with carved wooden headposts. Kádár died on 6 July 1989, on the same day the Supreme Court annulled Nagy's sentence. On 23 October 1989 the Republic of Hungary was proclaimed from the balcony of Parliament; free elections followed in spring 1990, and the last Soviet soldier left in June 1991. Today 23 October is a national holiday.
Walk it
Our 1956 walk follows these places in a single day's route. It starts on the Buda side at Széna tér, goes on to Bem tér and the old military prison on Fő utca, then crosses to Kossuth tér, Szabadság tér, the Radio, the former Köztársaság tér, Corvin köz and the Kilián barracks. It ends at the Technical University, where it all began. Every stop has its story, with the sources. 23 October is a national holiday in Hungary, so check opening times before you go.