It is commonly aggreed that the best Flea Market in Budapest is the Ecseri. It is a worthwhile trip to make, I've been there twice and it was hard to tear myself away even in zero degree weather. However, there is another more centrally located flea market. It's the Novák Piac at 1 Dózsa György utca. This is one cheap-ass bazaar - a capitalist kaleidoscope of the best and worst of 100 forint shops (like our American 99 cent-only stores), sprinkled with custom vendors of low rent antiques.
You have to be dogged in this place to find something worth buying. If by chance you stroll through the wrong corridors you may instantly get the urge to turn around and walk out when confronted by the piles and piles of crappy plastic toys, AA battery packs with a lifespan of about 1 hour, and Iranian chocolate bars well past their expiration date.
But there are some stalls with interesting things. You are likely to get whatever it is you fancy at cheaper prices than at the Ecseri, because the quality of everything here is so suspect.
No photos are allowed at the Novák so I couldn't document much... only that which I could get on the sly.
Not a great loss to miss out on photos though. Unlike other flea markets in Hungary, there really wasn't much interesting to capture. The interesting stuff is not conspicuous, and there are only so many artful ways you can shoot a dour-faced Romanian woman in front of a pile of Chinese knock-off blank DVDs.
A lot of this stuff is so cheap that at 4 p.m. when closing time comes around, small piles of stuff are left behind by the vendors like so much trash - not even of sufficient value to gather and retain for next day's sale table.
