A homecoming more than 30 years in the making

Stephen Hiltner is an editor, writer, and photojournalist on the Travel desk at the New York Times. In 2022 he was named Travel Journalist of the Year by the Society of American Travel Writers. He earned his Master’s Degree in English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford. He joined The New York Times in 2016 after editing for six years at The Paris Review.

When I arrived in Budapest last April, I was daunted by my assignment. Traveling alone as a New York Times journalist, I was tasked with producing an ambitious photo essay that captured the essence of the city. I knew I had my work cut out for me.

But my trip was also a personal journey — a homecoming more than 30 years in the making.

In July of 1990, my parents uprooted my family from suburban Ohio and plunked us down in Budapest, a city that my then-4-year-old self had never heard of before. We — my dad, mom, elder brother and sister, grandmother, and I — were among the small number of Americans who moved to Hungary in the early years of its transition from communism to capitalism. (At the time my dad worked for General Electric, which had recently purchased Tungsram, the Hungarian light-bulb company).

It was an unlikely voyage for a middle-class Midwestern family. My parents, at that point, had barely left the United States, and the world, of course, was a dramatically different place: no cell phones, hardly any personal computers, no internet.

Without any easy ways of maintaining ties to the States, we tried at first to cling to what was familiar. On Thursday nights, in a space above the AISB’s lower school, then on Kakukk út, a group of families gathered under the banner of the American Club. We played basketball, scarfed down cheeseburgers, watched U.S. sporting events on satellite television. Other nights we’d trek from our house in the Buda hills to Blaha Lujza tér, in Pest, where a restaurant, Chicago Étterem, served dishes we knew how to pronounce.

Soon, though, we began to put down roots in Hungary. We traveled around the country — to Mátra in the north, to the Flower Carnival in Debrecen, to Szentendre. We started to learn the (famously impenetrable) language. We found a local piano teacher, Balázs Szokolay, who became a close family friend. We grew to love Hungarian cuisine, developing a preference for csiga over Oreos, gulyás over chowder, paprika over black pepper.

And in time we came to know Budapest with the same intimacy with which we knew Northeastern Ohio — to the point that, when we left Hungary in 1994, it felt once again like we were leaving our home.

Shortly after I arrived last year for my reporting stint, I began reconnecting with people from my childhood — with Laci, the fastidious man who drove my siblings and me to school each day; with Ms. Tracy, my kindergarten teacher whom I hadn’t seen in 30 years, and who happened to be on her own return trip to Budapest; with Balázs, our old piano teacher. I visited the new AISB — a beautiful and sprawling campus — on several occasions, to teach photography classes and to talk with graduating students about life after high school.

On a personal level, these moments made for some of the highlights of my three-month visit. But they also paved the way for me to meaningfully reconnect with a city I hadn’t known for three decades — and, as such, they greatly influenced my work. Laci, who picked me up from the airport, helped me get my initial bearings at my apartment near Rákóczi tér. Balázs and his family invited me to concerts that helped me develop a greater appreciation for Hungarian musical traditions. Lóránt Fabiny (‘11), an alumnus whom I met during a visit to AISB, connected me with Tas Tobias, a local writer whose recommendations proved invaluable.

In the end, my resulting 3,000-word photo essay, which ran on the front page of The New York Times’s international edition, was influenced in innumerable ways by my family’s history in Budapest. And it was ultimately my personal connections to the place — with family friends, with former teachers, and with an endless spring of indelible memories — that would make the work possible, and allow it to sing.