From “Paris of the East” to “Queen of the Danube”: International Models in the Promotion of Budapest Tourism, 1885–1940

During the late-nineteenth century promoters of Budapest were strongly influenced by international developments taking place in the field of city marketing. Inspired by the success of the Rue de Caire at the 1889 Paris World Fair, a similarly exotically themed park (called Constantinople in Budapest) was opened in the city in 1896. Moreover, the 1904-1905 Budapest car and flower parades organized by the Hungarian Travel and Tourism Company (founded in 1902) were also clearly inspired by those that had been held just a few years earlier on the French Riviera. Similarly, the bullfights the company organized in Budapest in 1904 were meant to transplant this event from its Iberian context to the Hungarian one. The post-WWI years when Budapest turned from the capital of an autonomous Hungarian state within the federal boundaries of Austria-Hungary into the capital of an independent Hungary marked a period of stark contrast to pre-war city marketing efforts. During the interwar period, influenced by Hungary's political veering to the right, Hungarian tourism policies turned increasingly conservative and nationalistic. As illustrated by the changing of Budapest's touristic slogan from that of “Paris of the East” to “The Queen of the Danube” the new marketing policy tried to distance the city from foreign models. In addition to exploring the pre-war and interwar differences between Budapest's responses to foreign urban tourism promotion models, the paper will also discuss the effects of the tension between nation-building and capital city promotion via international models on the content of Hungarian tourism discourses between 1885 and 1940.