Budapest arms & colours. Throughout the centuries (Budapest, 1998)
6 coat of arms has been sanctioned by nearly sixty years of existence." It is also true that in accordance with the colours of the arms accepted in 1873, the banner was to have consisted of four colours: gules, yellow/golden/, blue and white/silver/. 18 Based on their recommendations, a new coat of arms was created, more regular in shape and simpler in colours /see Plate IX/, but the second gate /representing Óbuda/ in the escutcheon of Buda was not dropped, nor did the two escutcheons change places. By having the castle stand on a green meadow, they prepared the ground for changing the colours of the banner: red- yellow- green. Red /gules/ was the common colour, yellow stood for the city of Pest, green for Buda. 19 The article of Law XVIII of 1930 — with its § 4 providing for the new arms and colours of the capital — meant a significant limitation in the capital's autonomy, and symbols emphasising exactly this kind of autonomy were not really welcome. They never became popular, nor were the times too favourable for that: the economic depression of the thirties, the disastrous war years were followed by the Communist era, when Budapest, capital of the Hungarian People's Republic °, lost even the vestiges of autonomy left by the 1930 bill. On the other hand, Greater Budapest came into being, with the seven towns and sixteen villages 21 linked to it, whose own arms and seals — symbols of their sovereignty — became just as redundant as that of Budapest. It was only in the 1960s that the officials in charge and increasingly aware of the then regenerating foreign tourism felt a need for Budapest to be represented by certain symbols in their propaganda for tourists As a result of this more and more pressing demand, the Executive Committee of the Council of Budapest put the issue of the city arms — not of the colours — on its agenda in 1964, then in 1966. 22 The new coat of arms may well have met the requirements of simplicity, so often emphasised in heraldry, but its new element, the red star, was certainly initiated not on scholarly but on political grounds. In 1946, with the proclamation
