History
After the fall of the Communist regime in Hungary in 1989, many of the Communist statues and monuments were immediately removed. These formed the basis for the current collection in statue park. On June 29, 1993, the second anniversary of the withdrawal of the Soviet troops from Hungarian territory, the park celebrated a ribbon cutting and grand opening as a public outdoor museum.
In 2006 marks a new chapter in the history of Memento Park. A life-sized copy of the tribune of the Stalin Monument in Budapest was built in the Statue Park with the broken bronze shoes on top of the pedestal. This is not an accurate copy of the original but only an artistic recreation by Ákos Eleőd.
In 2007 a new exhibition hall and a small movie theater was opened in Memento Park. The photo exhibition called “Stalin’s Boots” in the exhibition hall takes the viewer through the history of the 1956 revolution, of the 1989-1990 political changes and of Memento Park – with both English and Hungarian captions. In the barracks-theater one can see The Life of an Agent, a documentary on the methods used by the secret police, directed by Gábor Zsigmond Papp. The film is being shown with English subtitles.
Read more about this topic: Memento Park
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“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
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—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809–1894)
“What is most interesting and valuable in it, however, is not the materials for the history of Pontiac, or Braddock, or the Northwest, which it furnishes; not the annals of the country, but the natural facts, or perennials, which are ever without date. When out of history the truth shall be extracted, it will have shed its dates like withered leaves.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)