The architecture of well-being

Hungary and Slovakia offer two paths out of the long shadow of communism—one marked by restraint, the other by fragmentation. Both bear the physical remnants of central planning: block housing, collectivized landscapes, and the imposition of uniformity over individuality. However, the way each country has managed its recovery speaks volumes about what it means for a society to remain intact or to drift.

Budapest presents itself with remarkable coherence. Its buildings, many of which are from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, still gleam with deliberate care. “It’s on a par with Vienna, essentially. They were the co-capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.” Graffiti is rare. Public disorder is nearly absent. Children dress modestly. There is no visible homelessness. The streets convey the sense of a place that still knows its identity. “Society seems, frankly, much healthier for it.”

Across the border, Slovakia feels more uncertain. In Bratislava, graffiti scrawls across classical facades. A purse is stolen on a busy street. “You see almost zero graffiti in Budapest… lo and behold, we were in Slovakia… and my wife had her purse stolen.” Youth culture imitates foreign dysfunction, mimicking styles and attitudes alien to the local culture. The physical environment—crumbling panel blocks, stalled revitalization—mirrors a psychological detachment from roots. Order has been replaced with something closer to drift.

Hlohovec, a smaller Slovak town and former home to a once-significant Jewish population, holds memory in suspension. The Catholic cemetery thrives—marble graves polished, photos affixed, flowers fresh. But the Jewish cemetery sits hidden behind a wall, unmarked and nearly forgotten. “The gravestones were so, so different… thin, gray, semicircular tops to flat slabs… names eroded.” The neglect is not active desecration. It is worse—severance from history, as if memory itself had been quarantined.

Meanwhile, in Hévíz, Hungary, visitors gather in a thermal lake once favored by Communist party elites and German spa tourists. Elderly bodies float quietly in mineral-rich water. “There’s nothing wrong with sitting in a nice, warm lake.” The setting recalls older understandings of illness and health. “Malaria itself… literally means bad air.” Before bacteria, people feared miasmas—unseen forces, rising from swamps or decay, that corrupted the body. Those theories are gone, replaced by germ theory, but the tendency to ascribe illness to invisible enemies remains. “What’s the next theory after that?”

COVID revealed how germ theory, when used uncritically, can breed new kinds of irrationality. Not in its science, but in its social deployment. The woman who stumbled off a sidewalk in fear of an unmasked passerby, pointing as if seeing a ghost—her terror came not from a virus, but from the message that fellow citizens are dangerous. The mind can be infected. Panic spreads faster than pathogens. Authority, cloaked in public health, can undo the very social trust health depends on.

Under communism, architecture was used to instill conformity in people. “The Soviet concept was… to remake man into a tool for the state.” Buildings were gray and interchangeable, like the workers they were meant to contain. Today, many of those same blocks remain, painted in pastel, cosmetically improved but still haunted by their origins. The project wasn’t just material—it was spiritual. It targeted individuality, memory, and belief.

Hungary resists that erasure. The language is unique. The culture remains insular. Foreign ideologies, though present, do not dominate. “They don’t lose anything by not being a diverse society.” Continuity carries its own kind of healing—less noisy, less marketed, but no less real.

Health is more than medicine. It is found in how cities are built, how the elderly are treated, and how the dead are remembered. “Not everything that heals has to be measured.” Societies, like bodies, can scar. They can cause damage for decades. But some, against the odds, find ways to recover their form, their dignity, and their sense of self. Others forget. And forgetting, too often, becomes the first step toward decay.

Join us at 5 pm ET weekdays on America Out Loud Talk Radio. Listen on iHeart Radio, our world-class media player, or our free apps on Apple, Android, or Alexa. Discover all the episodes on podcast networks, i.e., Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, TuneIn, Stitcher, and iHeart. You’ll find them the day after they air on talk radio, available on podcast. Extraordinary voices for extraordinary times.