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

The time for the erection of a monument in the form of a memorial statue had not yet arrived. A 1933 issue of the newspaper Magyar&ág (Hungarians) spoke of the "unfavourable reception" that the initiative of setting up a statue had been met with "in the highest circles” at the time it was made (in 1914).

Opposition had died down by the time the 200th anniversary of "his princely highness’” death arrived. János Pásztor was commissioned to make an equestrian statue, which was then ceremonially unveiled on 2 May 1937, outside the House of Parliament.

The installation of a memorial plaque by Frigyes Glück was a gesture bespeaking a proud and noble patriot. It was a deed worthy of the liberal art patron, who had purchased seventeenth-century Italian, French and Dutch works for the Old Masters' Collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, valuable key and silverware collections for the Museum of Applied Arts, and donated important manuscripts to the National Museum. He had also initiated the construction of a lookout tower on János Hill (1902), had a bust of Queen Elizabeth (Alajos Stróbl, 1906) set up at his own expense in the woods of János Hill near Normafa, and the erection of another lookout tower, one named for Árpád (1929), is also connected to his name. As Elek Petrovics concludes in his obituary, "...the development, beauty and international renown of his well-loved native Budapest was among his greatest, and fondest, concerns to his dying day.”

Péro’s Demise

The grandfather of Péró — Péter Jovánovics Szegedinác — had settled with 160 soldiers in the vicinity of Arad at the time of Prince Zsigmond Rákóczi. Péró himself was born around 1655 in Pécska and by the first decades of the 18th century he had become the captain of the Rác, or Serb, soldiery of the Maros valley. He is a somewhat controversial figure of Hungarian history. The year 1735 found him at the head of the peasant uprising of Békésszent- andrás, even though as a soldier he must have realised that the movement, which had no clear objectives to follow or significant military resources to rely on, was doomed to failure.

The Békésszentandrás estate was tenanted by County Attorney István Tol- nay, a notoriously cruel man. Having sought redress at the County to no avail

'4