My Visit to the Pan European Picnic Site

The trees in the foreground? Hungary. The trees in the background? Austria,
There used to be barbed wire between them. Until August 19, 1989.

Some places you go to because there are great things to see.  Some places you go to because great things happened there.  One of the greatest events of the 20th Century that you never heard of took place here in Fertőrákos, Hungary, between Sopron and the Austrian village of Eisenstadt.

It was 1989 Pan-European Picnic.

And right there, where the yellow hatchmarks on the Hungarian side come to an end, is where it happened.

No no no.  Not the picnic.  The picnic did not take place in the middle of the road.

Hungary's communist leadership cut a giant gaping whole in the Iron Curtain, which was actually a barbed wire curtain in reality, and hundreds of East Germans poured through.  Within weeks, on November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall itself fell and, shortly afterwards, communist governments began falling in Eastern Europe.

It started, innocently enough, with a picnic outside of Sopron.  The "picnic" was a ruse to experiment with a "temporary" opening of Hungary's sealed-shut border with Austria.  It was an amazing success.  This is a memorial gate to the door that cracked open:

There is still a small section of barbed wire left as a reminder,

A lot of open space here, so it could be used for a real picnic and not just a ruse picnic.

This monument is the centerpiece of the Pan European Picnic grounds:

It is called "the Statue of Liberty of Europe."

The name is apropos given where this is.  As far as modern statuary goes, I would rate this "it could be worse."  Hey, I'm a conservative.  I like my memorial statuary to feature a man on a horse, a woman in flowing robe with one bare breast (always one breast, never both), and maybe an eagle or an angel.

This path leads to the guard tower.

That is the same guard tower that was standing at the time of the picnic.  If you watch the video clips from the 1989 events for which I've embedded links, you'll see the guard tower,

This is a memorial pavilion donated by Japan.  Köszönöm, Japan.

This is a "memorial column," looking a bit totem ish.

This is a map of the whole grounds:

So why is this so little known in the west?  Events.  Events happened so quickly, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, then the falls of communist governments in East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania (the bloodiest of them all, with the public execution of Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife) and, finally, the fall of the whole Soviet Union.  It's difficult to remember that this was the first of that series of quickly-happening events in the second half of 1989 that resulted in the End of Communism.

And it all started in a field outside of Sopron, Hungary.