20 August fireworks: Budapest Mayor highlights importance of environmental protection

The mayor of Budapest has highlighted the importance of environmental protection during preparations for the celebration of the founding of the Hungarian state.

“We must consider the obligation our glorious past demands of us for the future,” Gergely Karácsony said on Facebook on Friday. “Let’s celebrate with humility towards the heritage entrusted to us: our environment.”

He accused organisers of a concert to be held in the Taban district of the capital on Sunday of showing “zero interest” in the park’s environment, and he appealed to concert-goers to take care of the area.

Referring to the national holiday fireworks, he said: “Some like fireworks but others are outraged that money is being spent on them during hard times.”

Pointing to the pollution, noise and stress felt by animals, he said fireworks should be replaced by light shows using new technologies.

The following picture was taken in the Taban district:

“The oldest tree in the Taban has been standing here for at least two hundred years. The park was renovated a few years ago at a cost of HUF half a billion. It does not deserve this. The concert organisers seem to be totally indifferent to this,” Karácsony wrote in his Facebook post.

PM’s chief of staff: Preserving St. Stephen’s legacy ‘protecting freedom’

Preserving the legacy of King St. Stephen “means protecting freedom and Europe’s traditional values and promoting national sovereignty,” Gergely Gulyás, the head of the Prime Minister’s Office, told a celebration on Friday, ahead of Hungary’s 20 August national holiday.

Marking the “1023rd birth anniversary of the Hungarian state”, Gulyás called on Hungarians to show gratitude for “40 lifespans of work and service through which the nation has survived over the centuries”.

“We must study the path behind us so that we do not lose the way ahead,” he said.

Gulyás also highlighted the work of St. Stephen in “choosing Christianity and the West of those times”. He added, however, that “after a thousand years the situation in Europe is such that there is no longer a path to western Europe through Christianity.”

“Whatever has been shared in European faith, culture and thinking has been rejected, forgotten and left behind by western Europe,” he said, adding that Christianity had been “banned from society’s basic principles, laws and politics, allowing an ideology to take over questioning, rejecting and removing all European values.”

At the ceremony, Gulyás, on behalf of President Katalin Novák, handed over the Order of Merit of Hungary, Commander’s Cross, to István Zsolt Gyulai, Olympic and world champion kayaker, head of the Hungarian Olympic Committee, as well as Gabriella Vukovich, retired head of the Central Statistical Office.

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