Shoes on the Danube Bank
Sixty pairs of iron shoes face the river where 23,500 people were shot and carried away by the current.
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Arrow Cross militiamen ordered victims to remove their shoes before executing them at the water's edge — shoes were valuable, bodies were not. Film director Can Togay and sculptor Gyula Pauer erected this memorial in 2005 to hold that specific brutality in place. Twenty thousand of the 23,500 dead were Jewish, killed mostly in December 1944 and January 1945.
What to look for
- Sixty pairs of period-appropriate iron shoes fixed directly to the stone embankment, each facing the water
- The 40-metre-long stone bench, 70 cm high, running the length of the installation behind the shoes
- Three cast iron plaques with the memorial text in Hungarian, English, and Hebrew
On the Pest bank of the Danube Promenade, about 300 metres south of the Hungarian Parliament, between Roosevelt Square and Kossuth Square.
Shoes on the Danube Bank is one of 37 sights worth the detour in Budapest, all bundled offline in Voyage GO — download the Budapest pack and it sits on your map with no signal, filling your travel passport the moment you walk past.
More to see in Budapest
- Hungarian Parliament BuildingA political manifesto in stone: Hungary's parliament was built to look like Westminster, on purpose, with 40 kg of gold inside.
- Buda CastleA palace first raised in 1265, severely damaged in the Siege of Budapest during World War II, and rebuilt by a communist government — the scars and the seams are the story.
- Széchenyi Chain BridgeThe bridge that stitched Buda and Pest into one city — designed in Britain, shipped in sections, and opened in 1849 as one of the world's longest spans.
- Heroes' SquareAt the far end of Andrássy Avenue, a monument built in 1896 fixes the Magyar conquest of 896 AD in stone — seven founding chieftains, national leaders, and the plaza where Hungary reburied Imre Nagy in 1989.
- AquincumMarcus Aurelius is believed to have written parts of the Meditations here — on the Roman empire's frontier, not in Rome.
- St. Stephen's BasilicaThe first King of Hungary's mummified right hand sits in a reliquary here — and the dome above you had to be torn down and rebuilt from nothing after it collapsed in 1858.