The boots are the first element of ?Witness Square?, which is to become an extension of the Statue Park.
Witness Square will feature two barrack-like wooden structures together with the boots. The buildings are to be used for exhibitions, conferences, film screenings, theatre performances and concerts.
The square will ?further develop the train of thought? started by the Statue Park, according to the designers. The addition is to be completed by 2009.
The Statue Park was the brainchild of literary historian László Szörényi, who first conceived of a place where all of the statues of Lenin in Hungary would be gathered in a single location in 1989.
In 1991, after the fall of communism, the Budapest city council decided that each of the capital?s districts would be allowed to determine the fate of Soviet-era monuments. A tender was called to determine the future of those statues which were removed. The architect Ákos Eleőd beat two other applicants in the tender with his proposal to move the statues to a single location. After much consideration, a site offered by District XXII, in the southwest of Budapest, was decided on, and the museum opened in the autumn of 1993.
Lines from Gyula Illyés?s famous poem ?A Sentence About
Tyranny? were inscribed on the gates to the park.
The park is now visited by about the same number of Hungarians as foreign tourists.
Source: Múlt-kor / www.szoborpark.hu
For more information about the Statue Park visit http://www.szoborpark.hu/index.php?Lang=en.
For more information about Memento Park visit
http://www.szoborpark.hu/mementopark/amemento.htm.
To read ?A Sentence About Tyranny? in English visit http://www.hungarianquarterly.com/no139/p15.html.
