YOLO Journal Issue 12 - Flipbook - Page 40
be the most famous public bath house…
well, anywhere. Unlike the ancient
bath sites in Buda, this Neo-Baroque,
19th-century domed oval, painted in
places a vivid lemon yellow (in startling
contrast to the aquamarine waters), was
created to divert the hot springs into
man-made pools. Surrounded by the
park, the zoo, and the massive museums
built to host the millennium celebrations
of 1896 (a kind of World’s Fair put on to
celebrate a thousand years of Hungary,
from when, legend has it, the Magyars
settled the Carpathian Basin), and fed
by two thermal channels, Széchenyi is
a sort of all-ages outdoor party at all
times of the day. Old men gather to
play chess, kids and families come to
play, and adolescents meet to flirt and
frolic, all while bobbing in the healing,
sulfurous waters.
Which you’d expect to be a bit of
a challenge for the more introverted
among us. Except that all of these
bathhouses seem to have been built with
the understanding that hot waters, with
their billowing curtains of steam, are
also great places for the solitary visitor.
Every pool I sat steeping or sort of sloppily swimming in, on both sides of the
Danube, had plenty of private nooks in
which to contemplate the steam, and to
simmer in my overheated thoughts on
the history of the city above.
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