A gripping and detailed study of the brutal urban battle for Budapest, which saw German and Hungarian troops struggling to halt the joint Soviet-Romanian offensive to take the key city on the Danube. The 52-day-long siege of Budapest witnessed some of the most destructive urban fighting of the war. The Transdanubia region was strategically vital to Nazi Germany for its raw materials and industry, and because of the bridgehead it allowed into Austria. As a result, Hitler declared Budapest a fortress city in early December 1944. The battle for the city pitted 90,000 German and Hungarian troops against 170,000 Soviet (2nd and 3rd Ukrainian Fronts) and Romanian attackers. The operations to take the city ran across several phases, from the initial Soviet approach to Budapest commencing in late October 1944, through the encirclement of city first on the Pest side of the Danube, and then on the Buda bank, and on to the savage urban fighting that began in December 1944 for the Hungarian capital. This superbly detailed work analyses the background, chronology and consequences of the siege from both a military and political perspective, and documents the huge losses in military and civilian casualties and material damage.

You can count on Rick Steves to tell you what you really need to know when traveling in Budapest. Following this book's self-guided walks, you'll explore Europe's most underrated city. Soak with Hungarians in a thermal bath, sample paprika at the Great Market Hall, and take a romantic twilight cruise on the Danube. Wander through the opulence of Budapest's late-19th-century Golden Age. View relics of the bygone communist era at Memento Park. For a break, head into the countryside for Habsburg palaces and Hungarian folk villages. Rick's candid, humorous advice will guide you to good-value hotels and restaurants. He'll help you plan where to go and what to see, depending on the length of your trip. You'll learn which sights are worth your time and money and how to get around like a local. More than just reviews and directions, a Rick Steves guidebook is a tour guide in your pocket.

As the Soviet Red Army marches westward, the city of Budapest stands in their way. Encircled and severely outnumbered, the German and Hungarian forces attempt to resist the Soviet juggernaut and defend Festung Budapest to the last. This book brings the siege of Budapest to the table-top with in-depth information on the forces involved, linked scenarios, and new Theatre Selectors that make this an ideal resource for any Bolt Action player with an interest in the the Eastern Front and the fall of the Reich.

The struggle for the Hungarian capital in 1944-45, like the battle fought in the bend of the River Don, left an indelible scar on the collective memory of the Hungarian people.Although this topic has been discussed by several authors, using various approaches, no genuinely comprehensive account - based on a balanced study of relevant archival sources of the opposing sides - has been published on the military history of the battle fought within the territory of Budapest.Bulgarian researcher Kamen Nevenkin's Fortress Budapest covers the military history of Operation Budapest. By studying and analyzing massive amounts of important and/or intriguing details, and utilizing an unprecedented amount of archival sources and materials - most of which previously inaccessible - the author provides an in-depth coverage of the 108-day operation. Within that broader framework, the author focuses primarily on the siege of Budapest, that lasted more than 50 days, on the war that raged within the boundaries of the Hungarian capital. The reader will find all the relevant details about the strength, organization and combat value of the opposing forces. One can be a witness to the ongoing combat events in each successive stage of the siege most closely on a daily basis, and sometimes even on an hourly basis. Individual chapters deal with the defensive system of the town that had been turned into a fortress, the combat actions fought on the respective areas of Pest, Buda and Margit Island, the sorties flown by the Soviet air units against Budapest, the air-supply efforts to support the besieged troops, and of course the breakout attempt.The wide range of illustrations, presented in this two-volume monograph proves itself more than coequal with the verbal contents of he book. Using reproductions of detailed contemporary map sketches, readers can easily explore the fortified sectors within the defensive system including their fire plans, and several combat actions. The edition contains several, hitherto unpublished, photographs from the period of the struggle for Budapest (many of them are also important for both history of urban development and architecture). It is therefore reasonable to say that this monograph is one of the standard reference works published over the past years.

October 1944: Soviet troops launched a powerful attack on Budapest from the south, the culmination of a series of military, political, diplomatic and underground moves undertaken by Hitler, Stalin and Churchill since the collapse of the Axis front in the Balkans two months earlier. However, what had been planned as a bold stroke to knock Hungary out of the war and bring the Red Army as far as Munich quickly became a statemate. The end result was taht Stalin's forces failed to reach Bavaria, but the dictator was not disappointed: Soviet pressure against the German southern flank forced Hitler to transfer a consdierable number of his armoured reserves to Hungary and thus largely facilitated Zhukov's drive on to Berlin. Here, Kamen Nevenkin tells the fascinating story of this 'Market Garden'-like operation using a number of never before published German and Russian archival documents, including German papers exclusively held in the Russian militiary archive. The text is dynamic, easy to read and accompanied by previously unpublished photographs. A detailed tactical narrative, Nevenkin also uses first-person accounts to render a human tale of war to create an ultimately fascinating read.

Bartók's music is greatly prized by concertgoers, yet we know little about the intellectual milieu that gave rise to his artistry. Bartók is often seen as a lonely genius emerging from a gray background of an "underdeveloped country." Now Judit Frigyesi offers a broader perspective on Bartók's art by grounding it in the social and cultural life of turn-of-the-century Hungary and the intense creativity of its modernist movement. Bartók spent most of his life in Budapest, an exceptional man living in a remarkable milieu. Frigyesi argues that Hungarian modernism in general and Bartók's aesthetic in particular should be understood in terms of a collective search for wholeness in life and art and for a definition of identity in a rapidly changing world. Is it still possible, Bartók's generation of artists asked, to create coherent art in a world that is no longer whole? Bartók and others were preoccupied with this question and developed their aesthetics in response to it. In a discussion of Bartók and of Endre Ady, the most influential Hungarian poet of the time, Frigyesi demonstrates how different branches of art and different personalities responded to the same set of problems, creating oeuvres that appear as reflections of one another. She also examines Bartók's Bluebeard's Castle, exploring philosophical and poetic ideas of Hungarian modernism and linking Bartók's stylistic innovations to these concepts.

This book is the shortened and revised version of the authors? volume ?Fortresses and Fortress Garrisons in Ottoman Hungary I?III?, published in Hungarian by the Institute of History, Hungarian Academy of Sciences (Budapest, 2007). This revised version contains considerable alterations in order to suit better for the needs of non-Hungarian readers. However, the book maintains the original structure: the first part is a monograph about the Ottoman border defense system and its garrison troops, the second part is a data collection concerning Ottoman fortresses. This collection is based on a wide range of sources like Ottoman pay lists (mevacib defterleri) that are kept in archives of Vienna, Istanbul, Berlin, Budapest etc., records of the treasury house that contain pay accounts (hazine defterleri), estate records (icmal defterleri) and tax censuses (mufassal defterleri).0The border of the Ottoman Empire and the Habsburg Kingdom of Hungary remained a battlefield during the sixteenth?seventeenth centuries. Fights persisted even in-between officially declared wars, effective truces were absent in those decades in Hungary. The parties strove for expanding their influence over greater territories and above all to collect taxes. Garrison troops were assigned to ravage the other?s lands by both parties therefore the significance of these fortresses remained high even in times of formal peace.