gordonzola

I was reading

charva’s journal the other day and was shocked to find that she had gone to the Museum of Torture in the Czech Republic. I hadn’t met many people who had been there and I promised to post the pictures I took when I was there in 1993. Photographs weren’t allowed, then or now, but the tour guide let it be known that we could buy a "photography license". Of course, if anyone else came around we couldn’t take photos. Nudge, nudge, wink, wink.

But then, after I uploaded the pics yesterday I got confused. The Museum I went to was in Budapest. And I vaguely remembered that it was a Hungarian history museum that was just so brutal our friends called it the torture museum. Or perhaps I got confused and they were talking about Prague and I thought they were talking Budapest.

Either way, The glory of the Austro-Hungarian Empire revolved around lots of immolation and beheading. Our guide told us the stories, part in German, part in English, but I couldn’t really follow the stories then and certainly can’t remember who is who now.

But hey,

charva This isn’t the place, is it?

Wax! All wax, I swear. I had never really thought of the Hungarians as a violent people before this tour. My mistake.

This was someone who became ruler of the empire through a series of killings. Or something.

Someone burned and begging for mercy. Did I mention it was a little creepy to be underground somewhere in the Buda hills, no one knowing where we were, among all this stuff? I tried to not think about every single horror movie I’d ever seen.