It's 50 years since Russian tanks rolled into Budapest to crush the 1956 uprising. David Sutton visited a battle-scarred city of caves, churches, spas and statues. Photos by the author.

Budapest is like all European cities, just more so. Built up, layer upon layer, over the centuries, its bewildering variety of structures – both above and below ground – map continuities, disjunctions and historical fault-lines, and bear witness to war, invasion and occupation. Budapest shows the traces left by such grand historical forces more nakedly than Rome, London or Paris – after all, the city has been bombarded, burned and blown up many times through the centuries as Hungary struggled, mostly in vain, to preserve her nationhood; poor old Buda Castle, it's said, has been rebuilt some 86 times since it first went up in the 13th century. The mediæval city is almost completely gone, swept away when the invading Ottoman Turks arrived; signs of their long occupation are also few, as the besieging Habsburgs razed Budapest all over again.

And Budapest shows the scars not just of old battles, but of two of the 20th century's darkest periods – the Nazi conquest of Europe and the post-war Communist occupation of its Eastern states. It was one of the sites in which these two opposing ideologies clashed, a city occupied by the Wehrmacht and besieged by the Red Army, the scene of months of bitter house-to-house fighting which left the city, once more, in smoking ruins.

In 1956 – 50 years ago this autumn – the city saw yet another bloody battle when the National Uprising was put down with brutal force by Soviet forces; once again, tanks rolled through the city's streets, Russian artillery pounded buildings into rubble and the Hungarian dead littered the boulevards and avenues. Bullet holes are still visible on the walls of many buildings today, although no one seems to know quite how to mark the anniversary of this brave, failed revolution.

If there's one place in Budapest that communicates the city's modern agony, it's the controversial Terror Háza or House of Terror, a strange, chilling museum which opened in 2002 to tell the story of the country's experience of organised state suppression under two regimes. It's housed in a large 19th-century house at 60 Andrássy Street, one of Budapest's widest and most elegant avenues; oddly, this innocuous looking mansion was to become home to two ideologically opposed but temperamentally similar 'terror regimes'. In the 1930s, the Arrow Cross party – Hungary's answer to the Nazis – rented meeting space here. Until the German occupation in 1944, Hungary had been an uneasy ally of the Nazi state; then, with the installation of an Arrow Cross puppet government, the occupants of what became known as 'The House of Loyalty' had a free hand, and the building's basement was used for the torture of hundreds of citizens.

In one of history's cruel jokes, the Communists – having cleared the Nazis from Hungary in 1945 – used 60 Andrássy Street to house their own secret police, the PRO (Politikai Rendészeti Osztáaly), which later became the dreaded ÁVH (Államvédelmi Hatóság). Quickly, the whole block containing No 60 came under the control of the ever-expanding organisation; underground, beneath the innocuous façade on Andrássy Street, a network of old cellars was knocked through to create a dismal prison, a labyrinth of cells and interrogation rooms where political prisoners were detained and tortured.

The cells have been reconstructed as part of the new museum; you descend into their depths by means of an agonisingly slow lift that sinks gradually into the darkness. It's a typically operatic conceit in a museum that relies on coups de theatre rather than old-fashioned display cases to tell its horrific story: a Russian tank sits menacingly in the building's central atrium, a towering wall of victims' faces rising up to the skylight; a vampiric-looking black car used by the ÁVH to pick up their victims is illuminated behind dark, spooky curtains; a huge glowing cross beams out from under broken parquet and torn-up floorboards to demonstrate the fate – and the clandestine survival – of religious belief under a totalitarian regime.

Neither Nazism nor Communism could tolerate rivals – Norman Cohn has demonstrated that both systems functioned, to all intents and purposes, as apocalyptic religious movements – and in Hungary, as elsewhere, the Soviet-backed regime tried to destroy the institutions of Christianity and Judaism. The state seized Church lands, banned devotional and charitable orders and imprisoned or executed religious leaders un-amenable to Party control. The new Gods of the Marxist State – immortalised in monumental statuary plonked down in prominent places all over the city – were jealous ones.

Fortunately for the contemporary traveller, Budapest's many fascinating churches and its fine Central Synagogue weathered the storm – although, visiting them today, it's hard not to think of the imprisoned pastors and priests, the executed monks and nuns and the 'Zionist' show trials of the early 1950s.

One in particular is likely to catch the eye of the visting fortean. At the southwest foot of the massive volcanic outcrop of Gellért Hill (named for the visiting Venetian saint who was rolled down it and into the Danube in a spiked barrel!) sits St István's 'Cave Church', perhaps the oddest in the city. It was founded in 1924 by a group of Pauline monks after a pilgrimage to the shrine of St Bernadette Soubirous at Lourdes, and after entering the side of the hill through a wrought iron gate one emerges into a large entrance cave, which is essentially an imitation of the famous Lourdes Grotto. This is only the start of the complex; from here, a tunnel winds steeply down into the hillside, guiding you into a network of caves, some long predating the church itself and supposedly once inhabited. Now, they function as a series of chapels and niches containing artwork; forteans will be pleased to find amongst them a Black Madonna, a copy of Poland's celebrated BM of Czestochowa.

This unique place of worship was consecrated in 1926, and the monks continued to work and worship here for the next two decades. By the time the Red Army reached Buda, the Cave Church had been pressed into service by the city's beleaguered German occupiers as a field hospital; Russian soldiers entered it on the morning of 10 February 1945 as the battle for Budapest neared its end.

As Hungary's new Communist regime gradually took control of every aspect of the nation's life, the writing was on the wall; at midnight on Easter Monday 1951 the ÁVH entered the chapel and arrested the entire order for 'treasonable acts' as part of a massive action against the Catholic Church. The superior, Ferenc Vezér, was condemned to death, the other brothers sentenced to up to 10 years imprisonment, and the church sealed up behind a 2.25m (8ft) wall of concrete for nearly 40 years.

As the Iron Curtain fell, this wall was gradually blasted away, starting on 27 August 1989, when the chapel reopened. A large concrete fragment now stands outside the gates, bearing witness to the Cave Church's long immurement. And today, the Pauline Order is back in residence beneath Gellért Hill.

The cave is said to be the site of an ancient cave that gave 'Pest' its name ('Cave', if you were wondering) and the abode of an old hermit – some say of St István himself, seen in statue form outside the church – who used the thermal waters which gushed from it to heal the sick. The waters still flow beneath Budapest, keeping the city's amazing collection of spas – from the city's only surviving Ottoman buildings, the Ruda and Kiraly baths in Buda, to the grandiose, 19th-century Széchenyi complex in Pest – bubbling to this day.

If you feel in need of a little R&R, the renowned Gellért Hotel sits opposite the Cave Church, and contains one of the city's most famous spas, putting to excellent use the thermal springs with which the hermit once healed his followers. This crumbling Art Nouveau edifice, long past its glory days, is well worth a visit, and not just to take the sulphurous waters but to experience another side of Hungary's Communist legacy – a staggering degree of Soviet-style bureaucracy that makes gaining entrance to the baths a protracted nightmare of mysterious paperwork, labyrinthine warrens of changing rooms and, for this traveller at least, a rapidly growing sense of utter helplessness and mounting anxiety. Imagine a novel set in a bathhouse and written by Kafka and you'll have some idea of what to expect.

The waters that carved out the Cave Church and keep the Gellért's pools filled with grumpy old Hungarians and bemused tourists have left an amazing complex of subterranean tunnels and caves beneath Budapest. It's possible to explore some of those under Castle Hill by visiting one of the city's more recent – and decidedly oddest – tourist attractions: The Labyrinth of Buda Castle.

A 10km (6 mile) network of manmade passageways and ancient natural caves runs beneath the hill – a mixture of prehistoric caverns, mediæval cellars, wartime bomb shelters and a secret military complex from the Cold War. For a while, the site was a cave museum, then Hungary's first waxworks, displaying tatty models of figures from the country's history and some implements of torture, London Dungeon style. Major reconstruction of the complex took place in the late 1990s, and since then it has reopened as the 'Labyrinth'.

It's a bizarre place, alright. This eerie nether realm seems to have been reclaimed from history – perhaps as a response to their country's headlong rush from Communist control into free market chaos – by a bunch of Hungarian New Agers, who inform us that a labyrinth "is a web of paths leading to our world, our history, or ourselves, which, given sufficient resolve, can be charted here".

So, one stumbles through the 4,000 square metres (1 acre) of this dimly lit underworld on some bizarre Jungian journey toward the truth about Budapest, humanity and oneself. Along the way, one encounters the "Axis of the World" – providing "a point of orientation in the labyrinthine maze of space and a starting point in the end and meaningless ticking away of clock time" (eh?) – replicas of cave art from Lascaux and Altamira, the Magyar Magic Deer, a red wine-gushing fountain and a huge, half-submerged crowned head symbolising the sad fate of independent Hungary.

And it gets weirder. After navigating your way through the "prehistoric" and "historical labyrinths", you enter the "labyrinth of an other-world", in which bizarre 'archæological' finds – fossil imprints of a technologically advanced, pre-human race who wore trainers and carried mobile phones – are displayed. I started to wonder whether von Däniken was in on this too. Thankfully, the eccentrically translated information panels let me in on the joke: these 'finds' were a heavy-handed satire on the rise and fall of Homo consumus: "The vociferous prophets of the apocalypse only conceal the problem, since the end, the end of a world, will not come overtly, with thundering and announcement. Nothing will invisibly snatch our world and being as a sneak-in thief." Strange, perhaps, that in these old tunnels, the terrors of the previous generation, the fears of the secret police, the dungeons, and the black car that comes in the night, have been replaced by new anxieties about free market capitalism, consumerism and globalisation.

After feeling my way through the pitch blackness of the "labyrinth of courage" – a disturbing experience, despite the comforting advice that the only thing in here to be frightened of was my own fears – it was time to head back to the surface.

If Budapest's labyrinth is now the abode of the mix 'n' match deities of the pagan past and the New Age, what of the deposed gods of the Communist era, the foreign gods brought by the Russian conquerors? Had they, like the God they'd sealed up in the side of Géllert Hill, been forced underground? Were they hiding somewhere in this city of tunnels, caves and dungeons?

In fact, they have their Place in the Sun – although it's a strange one. Displaced from the city they once helped destroy and rebuild, they now languish some 10km (6 miles) away to the southwest in Budapest's ugly, rapidly developing hinterland.

Statue Park must be one of Europe's oddest museums, an open-air retirement home for the monolithic statues of the Communist era that once dominated the public spaces of Budapest. There are 42 of them. Marx, Engels, Lenin, Bela Kun – the gang's all here! A bellowing, gargantuan sailor from the Republic of Councils Monument and an enormous, flag-bearing soldier who once guarded the Liberation Monument make terrifying sights, though inscriptions like that on the Soviet Heroic Memorial – "Everlasting praise for the freedom of the Soviet Union, for its independence, and for its fallen heroes in the battle to liberate Hungary" – are perhaps, in their Orwellian way, even more chilling.

Perhaps Statue Park is the inevitable result of the process that began during the 1956 Revolution, when the huge bronze statue of Stalin in Heroes' Square was sawn off at the ankles and torn down by protestors – although the toppling of statues, as we know all too well, doesn't always solve a country's problems. Now, these Olympian figures who once ruled the city preside over a scrubby wasteland gradually being filled with out-of-town retail parks and suburban housing: "Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!" indeed.

Driving back to the city, huge, colourful advertising hoardings for mobile phones and electrical goods distract you from the grey brutalism of Soviet-era apartment blocks and familiar fast-food brand names leap out from every corner; for now, it seems, the city belongs to Homo Consumus.


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