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Budapest’s haunted Soviet hospital awaiting Chinese
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Вход – as it is written in Cyrillic next to the entrance of the former hospital in the Northern part of Budapest. The enormous building has been standing vacant for almost 25 years. Red Army’s officers’ hospital was operational here until 1991. A security guard escorted the reporter of Index.hu inside: it looks like in the post-apocalyptic world of Stalker. Dark, cold, grey walls of concrete everywhere. The floor is full of puddles. The elevator doors are covered in rust, standing half-open in some places. In the hall, a rusty bed lies next to the dried-out fountain.
It used to be one of the most modern hospital buildings in Hungary up during the mid-’80s. The surgery pavilion with 260 beds was built based on Tamás Tomay’s and Levente Varga’s prize winning blueprints. The four-story building is divided into two halls with circular corridors inside. The hospital became available in 1985, but it did not function for long: after the Soviet troops pulled out, the Hungarian state did not have the funds to purchase the building, so the Russians took all the medical equipment. Now it is only bare concrete.
Time capsule
Or is it? In the community room on the ground floor, a red sign advertises the 28th congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and on the other side, a quote from Lenin can be read, which means something like this in rough translation: “We must have one motto: truly acquire military science.” Time has some interesting layers represented here: this place is used as a warehouse now, so they store the benches of a church or chapel under the Lenin quote and the CPSU sign.
The entire building could serve as a splendid scene for a war movie or a sci-fi horror. But it is not used for that purpose: sometimes police commandos use it for training.
We approach the second floor of the abandoned building. The painting of the staircase and the handrail is still in a good shape; many of today’s hospitals would be jealous. The dark and empty corridor leads to the former canteen, where Cyrillic signs tell us about the schedule. The wards weren’t designed for the accommodation of masses of conscripts: the remains of the doctor-calling devices and the lamps suggest that there were four or six beds in a room, and each of them had a balcony. One of these balconies still has a message written by a soldier: Murmansk 90.
Melting pot of styles
A spectacular view opens up from the top of the building. From here we can see that many buildings are standing in the surrounding territory from both the early 20th century and the ‘80s. The former workers’ hospital of Pestújhely was built in the middle of a beautiful park at the beginning of the past century with art noveau villas and Bauhaus buildings. The Red Army occupied the area in 1945, and this became Budapest’s second Russian policlinic (Гарнизонная поликлиника, Пештуйхель), which was extended by nine more buildings.
The nurse building can be seen in the opposite, along with a small socialist shop. Several buildings have been demolished by now, but not only the hospital was built here, but also nuclear, chemical and biological weapon proof service halls, bunkers and basements.
Bandages, ampules, patient records
We travel back a century as we step into the wonderful art noveau villa. The old buildings in the area were built at the beginning of the 1900s as neurology sanitariums. We can see that they would be inappropriate to function as hospitals according to today’s standards, but the buildings still look gorgeous. The Russians occupied this as well, and they left even more relics in this building.