Saly Noémi: Café?! Változatok és változások Időszaki kiállítás 2007. február–május (Budapest, 2007)

the calés door arca had to be at least 150 square meters. All other coffee locales, which did not fulfil any one of these conditions, could only be called or designated coffee bars. The French word 'café' became current in the same way from the 1880s. (Similarly accepted was the phrase Grand Café, which was simply a selfserving amplification ol the word, but meant the same in terms of industrial law.) There were of course cafés in Budapest before 1872 and not only the Pillvax, which remained part of a distorted historic memory due to the 1848 revolution and Petőfi. The new bourgeois jurisdiction made possible by the Compromise of 1867, did not bring the café into being, but only regulated an institution, which had been developing within the conditions ol the calé law of a feudal city (or over 150 years. Its specific features, later to become classic and 'bourgeoisified', took shape through a long organic process and at a price. Thus, ihe existence of Budapest calé culture can be place in a period I rom 1714, before the amalgamation of Buda, Óbuda and Pest in 1873 of course, up to 1949. However, we can be satisfied that this period stretches further in both directions, ft is possible that the café, somewhere around the corner of ihe present Molnár Street and Havas Street, belonging to the Southern Slav, Master Balázs was the first one in Pest. But this was not the case in Buda, lor during the course of the nearly 150 years of Turkish occupation, cafés flourished there, though they were entirely Turkish in language and services offered. Furthermore, the continuity was broken, for these too were destroyed in ihe battle ol 1686. Similarly - we will return to this subject - nationalization cannot be regarded as a final boundary. Not because one or two cafés were left as sample specimens, but more because ol the espresso bars already mentioned. Due to them, coffee drinking culture remained a public phenomenon during the years ol the communist dictatorship. At an)" event by 2041 we will not need to patch up many holes in the tattered material of lime when we put on ihe exhibition entitled Fixe hundred years of cafés in Budapest". All that has to happen is for the world and ourselves to remain intact. We inform you unselfishly thai the latter has less significance. If the genes fail, someone else will do it for us. We can see by now that there is no point in raising the question 'How many cafés were there in Budapest?" without the question 'When?' As we have mentioned, there were hardly three decades between the last Turkish café in Buda and the first calé in Pest, not a long gap in terms ol time, but still worlds apart. In addition, the year cales were first established, more precisely the proof ol their existence from reliable sources, has symbolic meaning in the cultural history of European cafés. It was in 1714 thai the famous U Caffé appeared in Milan, the first periodical to devote its pages to coffee and calés. But as far as Pest was concerned, growth in the 18th century was still very slow indeed. In 1729 there were three, and even in 1792 only 18 cafés in the city. However, stepping into the following century, growth was sustained and continuous: in 1820 there were 42 and by 1850 60 cafés existed in the towns later to form Budapest. The increase visibly speeds up after this point: in 1872 there were 150, in 1885 200 and in 1894 355 cafés existed in Budapest, so that in the following twenty years - sometimes with extreme swings - this number stabilized on the brink ol the World War I. As everywhere in Europe so in Budapest too, the great worldwide catastrophe decimated their number, around 200 in the 1920s and decreasing from ihen on