Saint Stephen

Or, in Hungarian, Szent Istvan - the first Christian King of Hungary, he's all over Budapest in some shape or other. Here as a statue above Gellert Square*, outside the Cave Church. A lot of walking today - and a fair bit of hill-climbing: we went over the Chain Bridge to Buda and took the funicular up Castle Hill to visit St. Matthias and the Fishermens Bastion, had some very fine cake in the historical Ruszwurm Cukrazda and then wandered slowly down from Buda Palace and back up again to the Citadella on top of Gellert Hill, a Turkish Citadel with a huge statue of Liberty that the Russians erected after the Second World War. We visited the slightly eerie Cave Church on the way down, en route to the Central Market to eat cherry strudel from a stand (just to keep us going, you understand...) Later on we had a dose of culture courtesy of the Hungarian National Ballet doing a beautiful performance of 'Giselle' at the Erkel theatre...




*I knew the name Gellert was familiar to me from elsewhere - Google just reminded me that it's the Christian Name of the baddie Grindelwald from the Harry Potter spin-off films...