Szatmári Gizella: Signs of Remembrance - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2005)

The white marble plaque features a likeness of Rákóczi that Horvai modelled on the emblematic portrait known from Ádám Mányoki's famous painting of the Prince. Set against the white of the marble, the gilded bronze of the portrait must have made a strong impression.

The inscription reads, or used to read, "27 March 1676 to 8 April 1735. Your homecoming on 28 October 1906 was a triumphal march, whose memory lives on in Rákóczi út. This tablet shall proclaim the grateful and hopeful sentiments of your true nation."

The menu card of the banquet given in honour of the unveiling ceremony is decorated by a scaled-down watercolour replica of the plaque; the courses listed on the menu include Kuruc-style steamed beefsteak.

Amidst initiatives taken to erect a statue to salute the memory of Kossuth and the 1848 War of Liberty, the name of Rákóczi was mentioned with increasing frequency in the late nineteenth century and at the turn of the twentieth as worth commemorating with a bronze or marble monument. "For a long time, historians have shied away from devoting more than a few lines to his memory," concludes an anonymous commentator in his retrospective article published in Vasárnapi Újság (Sunday News). "Even [Lászlói Szalay and IMihályi Horváth do so, lest, as Thaly puts it, the legendary figure, whose name was echoed by the whole of Europe, should appear all of a sudden as some Deus ex machina."

In 1904 the king saw fit to instruct Prime Minister István Tisza to study the question, no, not of erecting the Prince's statue, but of repatriating Rákóczi's remains. In his memorandum the monarch concludes that "the conflicts which have weighed so heavily on our predecessors for centuries have become by now the historical mementos of a bygone era.” The decision was not taken without a reason. In 1903, the opposition had turned to the king with the demands that the united army of the Dual Monarchy be divided, that the Hungarian soldiers be sworn to Hungary’s Constitution, that the national flag of Hungary be introduced, and that Hungarian be made the language of command in the country’s armed forces. However, the monarch’s response was a general order issued at the Galician town of Chlopy in which he spoke of his "joined and unified army," thus rejecting the initiative. The king went even further when in February of 1906 he adjourned and closed Parliament. It was perhaps in response to the large-scale protestation following these measures that he

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