Bullet Holes and Holy Fathers
If you want to know what history smells like, arrive in Budapest in June 1991: paprika and pastry, diesel fumes and a faint whiff of revolution wafting along the Danube. My family moved there on the final day of the Soviet occupation—me, clutching my six‑month‑old daughter, pregnant again, still unsure whether we’d chosen a brave new life or simply misread the map entirely.
It wasn’t until our Russian Lada taxi rattled us across the spectacular Széchenyi Chain Bridge: Parliament glowing, Gothic spires stabbing the sky, Buda’s hills on one side and Pest’s flat sprawl on the other, stitched together by an old river flowing like a blue ribbon soaked in a thousand years of history.
Our apartment up in the Vár (Castle District) came with ceilings so high you needed binoculars to see the cobwebs, threadbare tapestries that had clearly survived several regimes, and a “Hungarian bed” so narrow we had to lie side by side facing opposite directions, like bookends hoping not to be kicked off the shelf in the night.
City or Construction Zone
Budapest in 1991 was a construction site that had taken a side gig as an open‑air museum. Soviet soldiers still loitered on the riverbanks, hawking medals, uniforms, and the occasional AK‑47, as if they were used garden tools. Hungarians toppled Lenin and Marx from their pedestals while locals raced to rename streets faster than anyone could print new maps: Lenin körút was dramatically converted back into Teréz körút with a flourish of red spray paint right in front of me. Maps were useless. You navigated by landmarks: “Turn left at the church with the green dome, past the house still wearing bullet holes from ’56, then right at the Hilton. If you hit the statue with the missing head, you’ve gone too far.”
Altogether, it was a silent witness to Budapest’s recipe for resilience: part grit, part grandeur, and a generous splash of their world-famous spa water.
The Pope’s Visit
If transformation needed a parade, John Paul II brought the marching band. He arrived at the airport and kissed Hungarian soil, recently trodden by departing Soviet boots, and instantly turned Budapest into a sort of devotional theme park. Banners reading Szent Atyánk! (Holy Father!) unfurled, churches were scrubbed and reopened, and 20,000 police and security officers materialised on every street and square.
“You sure you want to join the crowds?” my husband asked. “For a moment like this? Even atheists come out,” I said, clutching my non‑Catholic belly.
Heroes’ Square swelled with hundreds of thousands of people. Women clutched rosaries, and children were hoisted onto shoulders. I stood on a narrow cobblestoned street while people wept, beamed, and squeezed in closer as the Popemobile rolled past like a very solemn aquarium. The Pope, serene behind bulletproof glass, blessed the crowd; an Armani‑clad guard briskly repelled my outstretched hand with a sharp “Stai indietro!” which felt unnecessarily personal. Still, I had seen him—really seen him.
The air shimmered with incense and sunshine. Choirs swelled, their hymns bouncing off Habsburg facades. Doves were released from St. Stephen’s Basilica, fluttering over the Danube like wedding confetti. The city felt at once ancient and freshly unwrapped. Beside me, a woman whispered, “They said there was no God. But he came back.” For several golden days, Hungary belonged neither to its past nor its future, but briefly and brilliantly to itself, like a country trying on its own reflection and finding that it finally fit.
The August Coup
Just as the city began to exhale, history called.
“This is CBS News in New York,” said a breathless voice. “We’ve heard there’s been a coup in Moscow. Gorbachev’s been taken. Do you know anything?”
My daughter was on the carpet, deeply involved with her blocks and unconcerned about geopolitics. “I haven’t heard a thing,” I said, which was true, if not particularly helpful.
“Turn on one of your Soviet channels!” the voice commanded.
I did. Classical piano music and Swan Lake drifted from the TV on an endless loop. In the Soviet broadcasting tradition, this was the equivalent of a three-alarm fire: no anchors, no news, just ballet and ominous piano, which meant something dramatic, undemocratic, or both was underway. Coup or catastrophe, if you got Swan Lake instead of the weather, you knew it was serious.
I relayed this to CBS, then called my husband, half‑wondering if tanks would again clatter down our cobblestone streets or whether we’d just be stuck with perpetual Tchaikovsky. A few days later, it was over. The coup failed, Gorbachev returned, and life resumed—Hungary, the world, and my family all shaken but upright, like a set of nesting dolls rocking on a shelf.
Renewal
Afterwards, Budapest’s rhythms settled into something resembling normality, or at least the local version of it. Trams rattled up and down the hills, beds remained comically narrow, and Parliament still glowed a storybook gold in the dusk, as if nothing dramatic ever happened there beyond the occasional fruitless debate. The past lingered quietly, but the city breathed deeper: open markets, laughter spilling from cafés, church bells stitching the mornings together.
Sometimes, from Fishermen’s Bastion, I’d gaze over the Danube and marvel at how Budapest had endured empires, occupations, and revolutions, and still managed to look hopeful, like a city that kept getting knocked down and then insisted on repainting its shutters.
On February 3, 1992, I had my second daughter in Vienna, Austria. The Austrians, not wishing to become an accidental maternity ward for wandering foreigners, politely yet firmly suggested that we return to Budapest as soon as possible. My daughter’s first passport photo showed her curled up on her father’s palm, looking both tiny and unimpressed by international bureaucracy.
Those years in Budapest became a hinge between worlds—between communism and democracy, East and West, my old life and the new one I was improvising with two small daughters in tow. I watched streets and thermal baths fill with a new kind of hope, the air crackling with change and possibility like static from a wool sweater. Long after the banners came down and the news crews drifted off to the next revolution, Budapest, that stubborn, magnificent city on the Danube, continued to reinvent itself.
*****
Budapest, Ballet, and a Broken Fairy Tale
By the spring of 1992, Budapest felt like a city mid-transformation, the air thick with exhaust, optimism, and the aftershock of the last Soviet troop trains leaving the country. The bullet holes in facades were still visible, but so were the new shop signs, the private kiosks, and the lines outside Western-style cafés that promised cappuccino and Coca-Cola. As an American expatriate still learning to say “jó estét kivanok” without tripping over the vowels, life felt like a permanent dress rehearsal: two small daughters at home, a partly unpacked apartment, a new job, and a sense that history was happening all around us.
On March 23rd, the English National Ballet Gala was honouring its Hungarian artistic director, Ivan Nagy. The State Opera House seemed to gather all of that fragile hope under one ornate roof. The royal advance team moved through the marble foyer with practised efficiency, reciting the rules as if they were sacred text. “British subjects must curtsy or bow,” they instructed. “Non-Brits may acknowledge Her Royal Highness with a polite nod.” The guidelines suited the atmosphere; this was still a city where people remembered exactly how to behave for visiting dignitaries.
“Just nod,” my husband whispered as we took our place along the staircase.
“I know, I know,” I replied, smoothing my dress and silently promising myself not to do anything that would embarrass either the United States or our new Hungarian colleagues.
I had followed Diana’s story from afar, as the shy kindergarten aide became the most photographed woman on Earth. By 1991, the fairy tale had frayed in full public view. The press chronicled her and Prince Charles’s separate schedules, his continuing closeness with Camilla Parker Bowles, and the way their body language on official trips seemed to speak louder than any palace statement. It was a marriage in crisis, and it shifted public sympathy decisively toward her.
Then she appeared.
A hush passed through the foyer, followed by a collective intake of breath. Diana swept into view in a stunning off-shoulder red gown, her tiara catching the light and scattering it across the marble like diamonds strewn on stone. Photographers later captioned the images simply—“Princess Diana at the Hungarian State Opera House, English National Ballet Gala”—but the scene felt anything but simple in the moment. She carried herself with a poise that seemed at odds with the headlines, bright and composed in a year already thick with rumours and impending revelations.
My pulse hammered as she approached. My husband executed the sanctioned nod with admirable calm, as if he did this sort of thing every week. Then it was my turn.
I met those famous blue eyes, and my carefully rehearsed nod evaporated.“Hi!” I blurted, far too loudly for a room that revered protocol.
A small gasp rippled along the staircase. Diana paused, turned back toward me, and laughed—a quick, delighted sound that broke the tension like glass. “Hi!” she called back, matching my tone with unmistakable mischief. Her smile in that instant was not the polished, camera-ready one familiar from magazines; it was warmer, as if she recognised a fellow rule-breaker who simply got there by accident.
Then she turned again and glided up the staircase, the red of her gown receding towards the Royal Box. My husband exhaled. “Really?” he murmured, somewhere between disbelief and resignation.
“I don’t know what happened,” I whispered, torn between mortification and a strange exhilaration. I had failed the test and, in failing, felt giddy and embarrassed simultaneously.
Later, Patrick Jephson, Diana’s private secretary, would recall that evening in Budapest—the patron of the English National Ballet in the Royal Box, the Hungarian-born artistic director centre stage, the audience cheering as he and his dancers waved toward her. He captured the sense that something more than a routine gala had taken place: an intersection of art, politics, and personality in a country shaking off its past.
From my seat, however, the formal symbolism kept colliding with that brief, unscripted exchange on the staircase. In a year that would soon bring a tell-all book, harsh headlines, and, ultimately, the public announcement of the royal separation, Diana’s image was being steadily remade—from compliant princess to independent global figure. Yet in Budapest that night, at the edge of the former Eastern Bloc, she managed to be something simpler and more complicated at once: a woman who could carry the weight of the monarchy and still return a stranger’s inappropriate greeting with a laugh.
Protocol, as Jephson noted, is a kind of choreography: steps designed to keep everyone safe, dignified, and in their proper place. But real human beings forget their cues. They fidget, stumble, and, on occasion, shout “Hi!” at royalty. The genius of good protocol is not that it prevents these lapses; it is that it can absorb them and, on a fortunate evening, even be improved by them. My misstep did not collapse the carefully built hierarchy of the night. Instead, for a heartbeat, it revealed the person at the centre of it all.
Was I a fool that night? Perhaps. But that foolishness gave me a fleeting, unrepeatable connection to someone navigating a far more unforgiving stage. Diana was learning, under relentless scrutiny, how to step out from the confines of a troubled marriage and claim her own public identity; Hungary was learning how to step away from decades of Soviet control into something resembling democracy; and I was learning how to live honestly in a place and a role that still felt new.
Sometimes breaking the rules is exactly the right thing to do—not because rebellion is inherently noble, but because, in a world of rigid scripts and public performances, an unscripted “Hi” can momentarily turn a princess back into a person and a protocol misstep into the most truthful moment of the night.
