The purpose of this project is to examine the role cultural tourism and extended Parisian stays of Hungarian politicians, artists and writers played in the incor­poration of a Parisian "myth of modernity" in the identity politics of turn-of­the-century Budapest. Using a comparative framework I intend to write a genealogy of· Budapest's self-representation as a "Paris of the East". My research purports to underscore the importance of East-West cultural contacts in the fashioning of a new type of modernist and democratic urban imaginary in East-Central Europe.