Image rescue campaign on the occasion of the eightieth anniversary of the siege of Budapest
We are seeking never-before-seen photographs depicting the siege of Budapest in 1944!
For the eightieth anniversary of the siege of Budapest, Fortepan and the Eidolon Centre are organising a joint image rescue campaign.
The siege of Budapest in 1944-45 was one of the most devastating and trying battles of the Second World War, as well as, perhaps, the most dramatic and still insufficiently processed trauma in twentieth-century Hungarian history.
In the two months of the winter of 1944 and the period immediately following, the multi-directional tension that had divided Hungarian society for decades and the drama of the endgame of the Second World War intensified with extraordinary force. In just a few weeks, the civilians trapped in Budapest had to experience the destruction of a significant part of the city, the deportation of the Jewish population into the ghetto and their mass liquidation, the Arrow Cross Party terror, the disintegration of Hungarian statehood and the birth of a new bloody world. All of this while trapped in shelters, in daily danger, insecurity, and unpredictable waves of violence, without electricity, water, and food. The end of the siege meant a new chance at life for many and the beginning of a new slavery for others.
Although the military and political events are fairly well processed and researched, we hardly have photographic memories of the dramatic changes in the lives of the civilian population, the drama of everyday life that is quite hard to comprehend when looking back from today. Although a series of diaries preserve the details and atmosphere of the everyday lives of people who were forced to leave their comfort zones, we hardly know about the photographs that capture this. The tsunami of photographs that capture almost every moment of the twentieth century reach a breaking point here.
With the image rescue program co-organised by Fortepan and the Eidolon Centre, we attempt to fill this gap and find those missing photographs, mostly in private hands, possibly hidden in the unprocessed material of archives, and present a hitherto unknown face of the Siege of Budapest. We are sure that fewer-than-average photographs were taken during this period, but we still believe that somewhere, forgotten, documents of this era still exist. It is our shared interest and responsibility to find them.
WHAT ARE WE LOOKING FOR?
We are looking for individuals who have photographs in their possession—images taken in 1944 in besieged Budapest—or who believe that the photographs they own might be related to the Siege of Budapest?
WHAT SHOULD I DO IF I HAVE PHOTOGRAPHS LIKE THESE?
We ask the owners of the photographs to contact the organisers at fortepan@gmail.com or on Fortepan's Facebook page. Photographs can be valuable regardless of format, quality and state, so we welcome submissions of negatives, paper photos, family albums and newspaper clippings. We digitise the received material as part of the program and always return the originals to the owners.
If anyone is aware of photographs taken during the Siege that are not their own, or of a photographer who took photographs during the indicated period, but do not know what happened to these photographs, please share this information with us.
We are also looking for public collections that have previously unpublished or digitised material and subcollections that show the daily life of the siege or are related to this topic.
WHAT DO WE DO WITH THESE PHOTOGRAPHS?
We plan to present the unearthed photographs—paired with a selection of already known images—at an exhibition organised by Fortepan and the Eidolon Centre during the autumn of 2025, commemorating the 80th anniversary of the Siege of Budapest.
Fortepan is a copyright-free and community-based photo archive with over 200,000 photographs available for anyone to browse and download in high-resolution, free of charge.
Media partner: Válasz Online /valaszonline.hu/
