Greetings from a Budapest

This image is already old (though not as old as the vehicles suggest), and it is up on several places of the the web, but we cannot aristocratically renounce republishing it, because it fits so organically our “past future” series, after the futuristic cityscapes, Moscow in 2259 and the eternal fire of Muir & Mirrielees. This is how they imagined at the turn of the past century (certainly not earlier than 1904, the completion of the Parliament) how Budapest would look ten thousand years later, when the finally dried up Danube, which ten thousands of years earlier had even covered the future Citadel and the Gellért statue, would dig itself into the depth of a canyon in the former river bed. The Margaret Bridge does not exist any more, since in lack of water the other bank is not the only possible target, and between the eagle’s nests built on the rocks of the canyon cheap airships carry the passengers, just as in all the other Hungarian cities of the turn of the century.


However, it was not at the past turn of the century that this image depicted the present one, but it is at the present one that it depicts… which one? Some imaginary state between the two. Perhaps that 1950 when air bikes circulated above Balatonfüred and a roundabout Zeppelin above Hajmáskér, a 1950 which, due to the train of history that ran on the wrong track in the previous decades, finally did not occur.


And the archeological exploration of a past which did not happen is hard work, much harder than that of a past which did happen. Kornél Ravadits, the creator of the image presents on a separate page the steps of the reconstruction. It is peculiar to see that today’s fantasy imagines the alternative past exactly like the hundred years earlier imagined the future. It seems that even steampunk was invented a century ago.