Memento Park

This guide to Memento Park in Budapest opens with a colossal Stalin statue unveiled in December 1951, sculpted by Sandor Mikus as a birthday gift to Moscow. It follows the monument through the night of October 23, 1956, when a revolutionary crowd rigged cables and cutting torches to bring the giant down. You'll hear how the park's architect later rebuilt the pedestal and gathered forty-two exiled statues of Lenin, Marx, and Hungary's own communist leaders around it. Look for the graffiti line people say was scrawled across the wreckage that night.