If a great city can be said to be like an individual man or a woman, then we will begin the metaphor there. If one were to try and learn everything there is to know about another individual, how much could one really come to know? How much does the author or the readers actually know about their own mothers and fathers, their own siblings, or their spouses? If we could endeavor to know another person completely, and we dedicated our entire lives to this discipline of knowledge, how much would we still be left in the dark about at the end of our lives?
I toured the fort on the Buda side of the Danube today, and the hill that overlooks the Pest side of the city on the opposing shore. For one person to know this city completely is impossible, I think. If understanding the average city is like understanding another human, then understanding Budapest is like understanding an entire tribe of people. Budapest was first settled by the Celts before Rome came to rule over these lands, and was overrun not only by the Mongols, but also by the Ottomans and Nazis as well.
Budapest has been settled, decimated, and rebuilt through forced repopulization campaigns on many occasions over time. The city is itself a core sample of the human experience on our planet. If the human creature has evolved through countless epidemics, migrations, and devastating shifts in climate in order to become what it is today; then the capital of Hungary has more in common with the average human than we know. What do you call something that thrives as a result of threats, chaos, violence, calamity, exposure, and the most severe of bruising?
If it is a city, then it is in a class with Budapest; the center of a white-hot forging which has been tempered by the hammer of God for two-thousand years.
albaniacalling 