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Can it be 500 years since Mohacs already?
Feels like only yesterday Hungary’s teenage King Louis II drowned in a stream trying to scarper from the Ottomans, whose cavalry had battered his army in two hours of ferocious battle, thereby leaving the Holy Crown vacant.
Could it be just half-a-millennium since the Kingdom of Hungary was splintered into three parts — controlled equally by Hapsburgs, Ottomans and the semi-autonomous Transylvanians?
Yes. Yes it is. And now, as the 500th anniversary rolls round, it’s time to talk about Mohacs. Because, y’know, Hungarians seldom dwell on past military defeats.
Hearteningly, MCC has decided to team up with the Ottomans on this one.
That’s: Mohacs 500 — Wednesday 9AM - 1PM, Tas Vezér utca — in which four Hungarian–Turkish research teams will present the results of their joint work.
Register here:
https://mcc.hu/en/event/2026-07-30-mohacs-500-dialogue-conference-and-book-launch-1
Around Town: Heat Wave Special
The city will hit 40 degrees today. Hot, even for a hot place.
Internally, emergency measures are being debated. The PM has decreed that no restaurant ‘no matter how fancy’, should refuse homeless people permission to bathe on its premises. Callous cynics are now camping outside Onyx, eager to see how that pans out.
As the PM understands, in this time of strife, it is necessary to stay wet. Here is your official BiB guide to summer water and where to find it.
Lukacs Thermal Baths
Lukacs is attached to an actual sanatorium hospital, so you will often see people there who are recovering from their knee op, or trying to get a grip on their gout, hobbling about on the kind of wooden crutches last seen in the era of Tiny Tim.
For the uninitiated: in Hungary, people actually believe that the only thing that stands between the sick and the healed is that the sick haven’t yet found the right kind of water to treat their condition.
At that, Lukacs is number one: all Budapest’s baths are somewhat sulphurous, but the water at Lukacs can be like sitting in a soup of boiled matches.
Definitely the nagymama’s favourite. Cut price pensioner days occasionally lend the place the air of a nudist care home.
Top hack: the rooftop lounger area upstairs of the outdoor pools. The sort of place you can while away a whole day with a good book and a tub of Factor 50.
Affordably priced — and half-price if you turn up after 5pm. Unfortunately everyone knows this, so you should never ever visit after 5pm.
Veli Bej Baths
Another hack for Lukacs is to avoid it entirely, and step twenty paces on, to this privately run bathhouse, with its own Turkic dome, maintained by an order of monks. No proper cold plunge, but feels grand and cared for — and also surprisingly cheap.
Szechenyi Baths
Szechenyi is the Wal Mart of water. You like 25 degrees? 5 degrees? 40 degrees and bubbly? They’ve got it, across some 40 pools. But as with any hypermarket, the paradox of choice can become exhausting.
Somewhere in the eaves, they have a sauna that would probably be called The Cobra if this were a theme park — not for the faint hearted; and they should take your picture at the end.
Palatinus Thermal and Open-Air Baths
Seldom mentioned in the tourist bumpf is this open-air pool complex on Margaret Island. Communistic workers’ paradise vibes. Family-friendly, civilised, with super-tube water slides for the tweens. A fantastic place when the weather’s right.
Rudas Spa
Instagram brats monopolise Rudas’ rooftop pool — and they are right to: it’s spectacular.
Depending on the day, the ancient Turkish dome is sex-segregated for either men or women. On these days, instead of bathing trunks, clients are required to hobble about in ‘aprons’ that leave the buttocks swinging free. No one knows why this is good, but everyone is too afraid to ask.
Legend has it that the dome is also a morning meeting place for local mafiosi, as the acoustics make it impossible to bug. The truth of this is unclear, but certainly it would be a great place to see mafiosi buttocks.
Around London Town: ARC Special
ARC was three days of fun in the sun. If you didn’t get a quip about how hot it was into your speech, who even were you?
Top trolling by the Sky News Australia anchor Peta Credlin, who decided to tell the audience that it wasn’t particularly hot — just an average Wednesday in Sydney. Brits hate it when you tell them their weather trauma isn’t real.
Eric Weinstein ripped through the Thursday mid-afternoon graveyard shift with a projectile of a speech, complete with a Unabomber powerpoint of spidery black fonts on a white background, strung with lo-res snapshots: taking in string theory, Epsteinism, and epistemology itself.
The previous day, Michael Gove and Sebastian Gorka conducted a face-off on the subject of multipolarity that had something of the high school debate team to it — hinging on semantic definitions and soft-soaping of the crowd: Gove winking to the demos and disingenuously praising his opponents; Gorka hamming up his levels of offended-ness. “Michael, how could you say something like that — about MY BOSS, President Trump!” Maybe Gove was thinking of a different President Trump?
All the important press were there. Pimlico Journal, J’Accuse. Even The Spectator and UnHerd made it past security. Freddie Gray confessed he’d heard of Based In Budapest, but not yet read it. Paul Morland said he’d read it but never heard of it, while his Canon Club Podcast co-star Ed West strode around in crumpled ivory linen, like the man in the Tangiers bar due to be found impaled on his hotel room door hours after delivering the microfiche.
Meanwhile, the DI’s American import, Sean Nottoli, was celebrating his first visit to Britain, a culture clash of note. Sean met a man he later told us was ‘a cartoonist from the Telegraph’ — a fellow called ‘Tim Stanley’. After some confusion, it transpired Stanley must have referred to himself as a ‘sketch writer’ — apparently not a term that makes it across the Atlantic.
A few oppo journalists skulked in the hallways too, looking for a nice tart piece of reportage to file — BiB spotted Simon Childs from hard-left Novara Media (Simon is a dear old friend fromVICE days). We immediately texted security to have his pass rescinded.
Back at the main stage, Freddie Sayers interviewed the proposed new boss of The Telegraph — Mathias Döpfner, the CEO of German media company Axel Springer. Springer are explicit in their charter that they are rightists: they believe in freedom of speech, in markets, and not being anti-Semitic. They write this on their website, and make a point of not hiring people who don’t hold to these values.
“And do you ever have to fire people on that account?” Freddie probed.
“Well, we hope they realise that their talents could better be served elsewhere…”
At Wednesday’s Danube Institute Garrick Club breakfast, Lord Hannan quoted Javier Milei in the original Spanish: “Everyone loves prostitution when it is not your arse.” Milei seemed to be the lynchpin around which much of the discussion revolved. Strange, for an event on Anglosphere conservatism.
But really, the days were nothing compared to the evenings. Tuesday night it was the Pepperbird with hip young gunslinger Emma Trimble, who confessed to not really getting music. By 9PM, most went off to watch that dire England game with Winston Marshall and his always entertaining fiancé Melissa Chen — who’d dolled herself up in an England top-and-skirt combo that Calum Nicholson christened ‘sports-business-casual’.
Wednesday, it was to the Beef Steak Club, for the ‘arts night’, where Pierre who does that right wing art gallery gave us both barrels of his Warholian wit. Inevitably, Gove showed up. At ARC, you were never more than two meters from Michael Gove. Nina Power was in there somewhere too. As was cancelled dancer Rosie Kay (a top laugh), Toby Young, That Niall Gooch From Twitter, John Gillam from the excellent Thinking Class Podcast, the also excellent song maker Ladybyrd, and the Blitz Kids-era bloke who’s started a right wing club night. We also met three young tankie ‘anti-woke leftists’, who all agreed that their favourite Prime Minister of the modern era was Theresa May. Strange things are mutating out there in the ‘heterodox ideas’ space. Maybe it was a bad idea?
On Thursday, only the true glitterati were invited to Ben Delo’s big final night party at the National Gallery; thence an even more elect subset then boarded a couple of old double-decker London buses on to Ben’s office — where he made an unusual entrance, the exact nature of which is protected by omertà - let just say that conservatism 2.0 is about opening doors.
“Több is veszett Mohácsnál"
“More was lost at [the battle of] Mohacs”
(It’s not such a big deal.)