Elisabeth Bridge

This guide to Elisabeth Bridge in Budapest opens on the morning of January 18, 1945, when German army engineers set explosives under the bridge's chains meaning it as a partial, controlled demolition ahead of the advancing Soviet army. You'll hear how the blast went further than planned, and about the ornate 1903 chain bridge that had carried this crossing for barely forty-two years, named for the empress Hungarians called Sisi. It traces the two decades the river sat with a gap in it before Budapest decided how, and whether, to rebuild.