Szatmári Gizella: Signs of Remembrance - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2005)
legs / As the hundred and sixty nine of them / Were walked up and down the yard / By those gruff musketeers / In the stunted tower / Was I locked with others / in the midst of walls high / wherein 1 sat sadly / Hoping for the day that /1 could be liberated." The singer's lot was still better than that meted out to Péró, "grabbed all of a sudden / To be offered up to / Buda’s grim hangman.” Their leader's fate was shared by János Sebestyén, András Pásztor and István Szilassy, who were all broken on the wheel and quartered for high treason in Buda's Szent György tér. The author of the verses "Péró’s Demise" is also unknown, even though the nineteenth-century historian Kálmán Thaly believed the originator of the song was the Kuruc captain Márton Tokody. The story of Péró Szegedinác fascinated the writer Mór Jókai, too, who even composed a stage version of the events. The play entitled The Heroinei oh Arad was first performed by the National Theatre in 1891. The first version had the opponents make peace with each other. The play was meant to placate the ladies of Arad, who meant to boycott the writer on account of a speech he had given in parliament. To honour the memory of Péró and his associates, the municipality of Budapest set up a memorial stone in 1986 on the spot of the execution. The monument, which bears a bilingual - Hungarian and Serbian - inscription, is fixed into the ground by a small path running from East to West and leading to the Alexander Palace. The Preacher of the Water Town At the age of thirty, the Jesuit monk Ferenc Faludi was the well-liked spiritual father, or preacher, of the German- and Hungarian-speaking Catholic congregation of the Víziváros, or Water Town, area of Buda in 1734. The god-fearing citizenry crowded to his sermons given in a small chapel functioning in what is now the parish house. Faludi's memory is now kept alive by a plaque featuring his relief portrait (by László Szomor, 1942) on the wall of the building at 7 Batthány tér, District 1. His superiors meant Faludi for another career, though. In two years time he was already director of Pazmaneum, the Hungarian seminary in Vienna. Later he also taught such secular subjects as geometry, mathematics and, what is more, military engineering as well as ethics in Linz. This region Faludi 16
