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

Teleki László tér

backfired because it so reduced traffic at the market as to be detrimental to the antiques dealers. "This is true incitement. This is what ignites the bitterness of the poor and oppressed. Such ill-conceived regulations and such merciless and rough enforcement — taking people into custody and fining them four pengő, as a way of demeaning the oppressed.”

In the 1930s another newspaper account described the escalating prices of market wares — as much as 60 fillers a kilo for peaches, for instance, and some vendors had no posted prices! Customers were outraged, vendors for their part complained that thanks to new regulations, they were forced to pay higher prices for inferior wares from wholesalers, instead of directly from the producers, and thus their losses were passed on to the consumers.

The Second World War brought tragic days to Teleki tér, just as it did everywhere else in the city. At Teleki tér 5, the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg saved 38 Jewish women from a flat on the 5th floor where they were held prisoners by the Arrow Cross. There was also the "Teleki tér pogrom”, in October of 1944, when Jewish students raised barricades against the Arrow Cross. The participants were executed in the courtyard of Népszínház utca 59, while others were gathered and taken to concentration camps. The house on Teleki tér next to what was then the Kaiser Pub became Arrow Cross headquarters in fall of 1944, and Jews were seized in the streets and taken here and to houses at 4, 6 and 8 as well. The "blood libels” of 1946 also took place here. Included in this was a consumer of head cheese who suffered food poisoning and shouted from the ambulance that it contained the flesh of local children, mixed into the delicacy by the local Jewish merchants. Crowds whipped up into hysteria on May 8 nearly lynched the "child-murdering Jew”, who only managed to escape to the hospital with a police escort.

With this many ghosts, this isn't one of the happiest spots in the city. Still, on a hot day, if a visitor sits in the very middle of the park surrounded by its dense swathe of trees — tough urban stalwart varieties all, like Koeireu- teria, sturdy poplars and locust — the collective rustling of the trees is almost enough to drown out the surrounding din of traffic, and it's still possible after all these years to get a cheap lunch at the market.

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