I have been maintaining a habit of reading about a place before travelling there. Mostly, it's either short story books telling about the cultural lore or history of the place.

Recently, I visited Budapest and read a book with the same name by Victor Sebestyen.

One critical topic stood out: "Budapest, the city, was rebuilt significantly in the two decades leading up to 1896 for a World Exhibition marking 1000 years of the country."

It was not a proper world fair, but we can call it so.

Since then, the same question has been running through my mind: what happened to world fairs, and why don't we have more of these?

Operationally, it gives me chills to imagine a "concert/festival" [in today's terminology] of such scale being pulled off across months.