What does Budapest look like through the eyes of children? Where is the best place to hide a spaceship? Where can you sit and think about life? Where can you find a house that sings, and why might the lions on the bridge come alive at night?
Book of Dreaming. Budapest is an alternative guide to the city created by children from the Hungarian-Ukrainian Bilingual Primary and Secondary School. Its young authors come from Ukraine but now live in Budapest. In the book, they show the city as they experience and remember it — through everyday meeting places, school life, favourite parks, bridges and squares, hidden corners, animals, smells, memories and visions of the future.
It is deliberately different from guidebooks written by adults. Alongside the Parliament, Buda Castle and Fisherman’s Bastion, it features small parks, ordinary streets, places behind the school, spaces beneath bridges and corners that adults often do not even notice. Some places the children do not want to reveal at all. In their Budapest, you can sit on a bench by the Danube and think about your problems, listen to the musical fountain on Margaret Island, or find silence and a place to be alone on Gellért Hill.
The book includes descriptions of famous and lesser-known places, a children’s map of Budapest, new symbols for the city and ideas for the perfect street. The authors also answer questions you are unlikely to find in a conventional guidebook: where you could keep a dinosaur, where the best place is to play hide-and-seek, where to hide a spaceship, and which place in the city is the most peaceful.
The children also propose their own walk through Budapest — from Heroes’ Square and the Parliament, along the Danube embankment and across Liberty Bridge, all the way to Városliget and Margaret Island. They encourage readers not just to look at monuments, but to notice the sky, old houses, people, flowers and birds; to listen to the bustle of the city centre, the silence of the island and the sounds of the Danube; and to pay attention to the smells of the city.
From this perspective, Budapest is both a real city and a space for imagination. The Parliament can look like a home for fairy-tale characters, the lions on the Chain Bridge may come alive at night, and an ordinary walk can easily turn into a story full of secrets, histories and small discoveries.
The experience of migration is also clearly present in the guide. Some of the children have lived in Budapest for two or three years, others for longer. They write about the city they live in today, but also about Ukraine and their wish to return home. School is an important part of their everyday lives — a place of friendship, shared language and a sense of closeness.
At the end of the book, the authors imagine the Budapest of the future: more multicultural, greener and friendlier, with water taxis, flying trams and drones delivering lángos. At the same time, they want the city’s hills, views, historic streets, sculptures and Parliament to remain. In this way, the guide also becomes a record of a particular moment — of what their lives in Budapest were like in 2026.
The Book of Budapest was created by children from the Hungarian-Ukrainian Bilingual Primary and Secondary School in collaboration with artists Andy Field and Beckie Darlington. The illustrations and graphic design were created by Kateryna Drozd. The publication was issued by ProProgressione as part of the international project The Book of Dreaming. Integration of Ukrainian Children with Refugee Experience through Art.
