East of Vienna, West of the Balkans

From Budapest: Portrait of a City Between East and West, by Victor Sebestyen, (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle p. 1:

Towards the end of the Congress of Vienna in the spring of 1815, Klemens von Metternich, the Austrian Foreign Minister, took a young British visitor in his carriage to the eastern edge of the city. As the pair descended the steps, the eminent Habsburg statesman pointed his finger to the road towards Hungary and declared: ‘Look, that’s where Europe ends…out there, [Hungary] is the Orient.’

Half a century later William H. Seward, President Lincoln’s Secretary of State, went on a journey around the world immediately after his term of office ended. In summer 1869 he arrived in Pest [on the east bank of the Danube] from an unaccustomed direction, sailing from the Black Sea up the Danube through the Balkans. Most visitors came then, as they do now, from the west. He was surprised by what he saw. ‘How striking is the contrast of European and Asiatic civilization,’ he wrote later in his diary. ‘Though Buda-Pesth [sic] is an inland provincial town…the tonnage in its port, altogether of steam, is greater than that of Cairo, Alexandria or Constantinople. We were not prepared for a scene of such activity…Here we feel, for the first time, that we have left the East behind, and have only Western civilization before us.’ This is a constant theme, as alive in the twenty-first century as in the nineteenth.