New East Digital Archive

Discover the archive photo project blending past and present in Budapest

18 July 2018

Hungarian architect Zoltan Kerenyi has spent years painstakingly piecing together a complex jigsaw of Budapest’s past.

In 2011, he began tracing archive photographs from Fortepan.hu’s extensive image archives to the streets and apartment blocks where they were first taken.

The result was Window to the Past (or Ablak a Múltra in Hungarian): an archive of 500 images merging photographs from both past and present.

The archive images span the entire 20th century, depicting families from the pre-War era, Communist rallies, and the rebellion of the 80s.

Kerenyi has now stopped creating new images, but still offers prints for those wanting their own slice of Budapest’s history.

“Budapest is a city with lot of buildings built 100 years ago, that still can be found all around even after wars and damages,” he told The Calvert Journal. “I had interest in the past, the people who lived here, who walked the same streets as we do today.”

To see more of the Window to the Past project, or to order prints, click here.