A bar in a derelict apartment block, furnished from skips, which accidentally invented a category and then a nightlife district.
In 2002, a group took over an abandoned building and opened a bar in it without renovating anything. They filled it with furniture found on the street — bathtubs sawn into sofas, a Trabant with seats in it, mismatched chairs, bicycles hung from the ceiling — and left the peeling walls alone. When the lease ended they moved to a bigger derelict building on Kazinczy utca, where Szimpla Kert still is.
The context matters. District VII was the wartime ghetto, and after 1945 the buildings were left in poor repair for decades: state-owned, underinvested, half-empty, with courtyards open to the sky. By the 1990s there was a district full of grand, wrecked nineteenth-century apartment blocks awaiting demolition. Ruin bars filled them, cheaply and temporarily, and the temporary stuck.
Szimpla now
It is famous, and it is full of visitors, and both of those things are often held against it. It remains worth seeing: a warren of rooms and courtyards over two levels, each decorated differently, with a cinema, several bars and a great deal of graffiti. Go early in the evening if you want to look at it rather than queue in it.
On Sunday mornings it runs a farmers’ market, with producers from the countryside selling cheese, meat, honey and vegetables, and a kitchen doing breakfast. It is a completely different place at that hour and much the better for it.
Elsewhere in the district
Instant-Fogas is the largest complex, several buildings knocked together with many dance floors. Ellátó Kert is more relaxed. Csendes is smaller and more art-school. Mazel Tov is a ruin-bar space doing proper Middle Eastern food and is a good deal more grown-up.
The tension
Residents still live in these streets, and the noise, the stag parties and the short-term lets have made ruin-bar tourism a genuine political issue in District VII. There have been local referendums on closing hours. If you go, the reasonable thing is to be quiet in the streets between the bars, which is where people are trying to sleep.
