From
the Midwest to
Budapest
Hungarian tour guide helps his country stand out
It’s easy to feel lost landing in a new country – even if you’ve done your homework, read guidebooks and travel profiles, gotten advice from seasoned travelers and read some local history.
To help make your trip as memorable as possible, you might need a guide.
Ákos (pronounced ah-kosh) Bátorkeszi-Kiss is a Hungarian tour guide who works taking international tour groups around Budapest. As his groups move from location to location, he speaks over an in-vehicle intercom in comprehensive detail on Hungarian culture, past and present. He also leads his groups around the major landmarks on foot and will track nearly everything in sight back through the country’s history.
It’s his job to make the expanse of a new country manageable for people who will only be there a short while.
“Every day, 90 percent of your job,” he says, “is the same sites, the same city tour. ”
Despite his saying this, Ákos seems to like his job and is a personable, intelligent tour leader and companion.
The four-hour city tour that includes The Citadel, Castle Hill, Heroes' Square, and maybe St. Stephen’s Basilica is very much a standard tour for Ákos. Most of those sites he lists are on the hilly Buda side with all of the thermal spas and oldest landmarks.
A guide like Ákos provides much more than you can get from a guidebook. His perspective on Hungarian culture, in particular, is valuable. He tells with a gleam of amusement of how Hungarians take pride in their narrowly qualified firsts.
For instance, the Statue of the “Turul Bird” on The Royal Buda Castle might only be the second largest representation of a bird in Europe, but it is the largest one of a real bird.
The only larger representation of a bird is the double-headed imperial bird in The Vienna Ring in Austria, an imaginary animal. This qualification is important and marks a point of competitive pride for Hungary.
Similar facts he mentions are that Budapest’s streetcar system is not the oldest in Europe, but its streetcar system has the longest cars of any in Europe.
The Budapest subway system was built after the London one, but its subway system is the oldest on the Europe.
The Hungarian Parliament is the third largest in the world, but Hungary’s Parliament is the most beautiful.
Story by Yorgo Douramacos
The secret to not getting bored with the repetition of the tours, he suggests, is to study – not only to stay fresh on old information but to always be expanding his knowledge.
If asked about his life, Ákos will describe it openly. The more you learn about him, the more it seems natural that he would become a tour guide as an extension of his ongoing habit of learning.
In his 40s, he has earned two university degrees, one in philosophy and one in economics. He pronounces economics with a unique Hungarian cadence that expands the vowels and lands hard on the last “c.”
As a philosopher economist, he worked first in private business in Hungary. He made what he refers to as a “good salary,” coordinating international business ventures between Hungarian and foreign concerns.
“Disgusting,” he says with finality. “Absolutely disgusting. My stomach went wrong.”
Leaving his well-paying but morally loose business job, Ákos found that his philosophy degree did little to supplement his income.
“I had the idea to study tourism and guiding,” he said. “So around the year 2000, I became a tour guide.”
From the way he speaks of it, tour guiding in Hungary is a closely constructed and regulated profession, requiring a specific education and license. For the first eight years of his work as a licensed tour guide, he was with Hungarian agencies abroad. He would land in a foreign country, Egypt, Syria, India, Thailand, and be onsite to guide visiting Hungarians.
This is a necessity because of the complexity of the Hungarian language. French speakers or English speakers might well be found in nearly any country, but people who speak the Finno-Ugric Hungarian tongue must be specifically imported for the job.
Ákos’ mind seems both acquisitive and adaptive, acquiring information and immediately putting it to use. It would be difficult to absorb enough in a month to guide new arrivals around places so terribly foreign as Egypt or Thailand. And one can detect this taste for variety and people in the next advice he gives for keeping the Budapest job interesting.
Occasionally he’ll discover new sights on or near his home turf, which also includes occasional trips to Vienna, Austria, just a couple of hours away from Budapest. During a tour of a castle in Hungary that had only been open for a little more than a year, he actively took photos and collected information to be used with future groups.
“It’s the difference between people and cultures” that also keeps his job interesting from day to day. This is a man who has done the legwork and makes his living by identifying patterns that meet his customers’ needs and preferences.
For instance, he describes how Indian groups are inquisitive and prepared, able to engage on arrival about Hungarian history and culture.
Japanese and Chinese groups require very little of him, as little as one or two sentences on why a site is important, and then they pose for pictures in front monuments and vistas, and then they want to move on.
He says he has to plan very differently for French and German tour groups. Germans he suggests do not mind being “overcharged” with information and historical detail.
French groups meanwhile require hours allotted for food and wine.
“The highlight of a city tour is the lunch [for them],” Ákos said. “Lunch is at least two hours.”
As for Americans, he says he likes them very much because they are polite and inquisitive. They might not be as conversant as the Indian groups are or as voracious as the Germans, but they wish to know what he has to say.
“And they ask questions,” he says with a gleam in his eye.
Exposition might be the stated “job” of the tour guide, but one suspects conversation is the core of enjoyment for this particular tour guide. For someone new to a country and perhaps even new to international tourism, a person like Ákos embodies an enlightening spirit of tourism. The one who knows it, root and branch: from the history of every site and landmark in his purview, to the cultural ebb and flow of international travel, to the qualities native to peoples around the globe.
It takes a wealth of knowledge and patience to be a tour guide. But it further requires a unique expansiveness of mind, a willingness to learn as well as know, to be a really good tour guide – like Ákos.
