City In Focus: Budapest, Hungary
PRAYER BRIEFING
Budapest is widely famed as one of the most historic and beautiful cities in the world. Its nicknames over the centuries have been the “Pearl of the Danube,” the “Heart of Europe,” and the “Capital of Freedom.” And yet the reality of human slaves trafficked through Budapest’s streets casts a dark and uncertain shadow across each of those monikers. If this city is truly the heart of civilization an culture, the very definition of freedom, then what must the rest of the world be like? Budapest is the story of a city embracing the opportunities of modernization, but at a sinister cost.
If you had visited Budapest in the late nineties, when the word “globalization” was just entering the venacular, a word used to describe how cities with centuries-old heritage like Budhapest were opening their doors to modern trade, you would have found inescapable scenes of the sex trade industry. The banks of the Danube were laden nightly with prostituted women propositioning an assortment of international passers-by. This brazen and grotesque industry was advertised in the literature of hotel lobbies alongside Budapest’s chief tourist sites. But a decade later, as Budapest’s reputation has gone from a vision of bygone centuries and developed into a bustling hub of commerce, the barbaric practices of sexual slavery have only gotten worse. Prostitution has only become legalized and gentrified to pander to the “refined” tastes of wealthy business class that flows from the gates of the airports to its conference centers in a river of taxi cabs. All this means is that the sex industry is booming, but beneath a store-front veneer that hides the desperate plight of women and young girls. Some have been trafficked here by nearby Russia and Romania, on their way to other sex-trade hot spots; some have been lured off of the streets with promises of glamorous careers in fashion and modeling. Whatever their story, these women pay the real price of “globalization” night after night in a numb stream of rape and exploitation.
Maybe Budapest’s latest nickname is most telling of how fully it has embraced human trafficking and sex slavery: “the Bangkok of Europe.”
PRAYER POINTS
- Ask God to send messengers of the Gospel to Budapest, to raise up an apostolic witness of the coming Kingdom of God backed by signs and wonders.
- Ask God for supernatural deliverance of women and girls trapped in sex slavery.
- Ask God to confuse the camp of the enemy in such a way that women and children can no longer be freely trafficked through this “Tier 1” city (which means Hungary is used mostly as a transit country, rather than a destination).
