Faurest, Kristin: Ten spaces - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2010)

Károlyi-kert

garden’s greenhouses in the colder months). To this day, the square displays some impressive potted palms in the warm months, recalling these times.

Perhaps most of those who visit the square don't realize how perilously close it came to not existing at all. Mihály Károlyi had at some point planned to tear down the palace and park, and build a dense network of tenements in its place, ostensibly to pay his gambling debts. The huge public outcry — then the First World War — thankfully prevented the realization of this plan. According to news accounts, the garden was temporarily opened to poor children and adults in 1919 in April, but closed again sometime later, surrounded by a brick wall. In the 1920s the property was confiscated by the state from Károlyi. In 1928, the city officially purchased the palace and made it a public playground, with the wall taken down. Károly Rade redesigned the garden in 1931—32, and it became a favourite meeting place and concert site.

■ "Even if it it, a garden you know by heart, there are twelve months in the year and every month means a different garden."- Margery Fish.

We Made a Garden.

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