Memento Park is a collection of 42 socialist-realism statues that were pulled down throughout all of Budapest, Hungary, immediately after the fall of communism in Hungary. It is located in the hills outside of Budapest, about a 30 minute bus ride from the center of town.
These statues glorify communism and the Communism officials and apparatchik who presided over Hungary during those dark days. It was a very wise decision by the people of Budapest not to destroy these ugly statues and, instead, to put them on display. They are displayed both as mementos of a terrible time that should never be repeated and, more importantly, to be objects of mockery. Evil cannot survive as an object of mockery and derision.
This is a very large statue of a Liberation Army Soldier, one of several statues cast in loving memory (at the time) of the Soviet Red Army. (By 1956, there was not much love for the Soviet Red Army in Hungary, Budapest in particular. But that's a long story for another time.)
Visited May 2010.
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