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

who are capable of idolising a man penning scurrilous libels against His Majesty himself."

The author of the "scurrilous libels,” as Kossuth was described by Lipót Ferstl, the Police Commissioner who penned the report, wrote a letter addressed - but never actually delivered — to his family: "you should be proud that the Genius of the Fatherland has found me worthy of suffering for my country”. This ended in 1840, when the king pardoned all his political prisoners.

It was near the Inn to the Eye of God where, erected by the Zugliget Association in 1913, the first statue of Lajos Kossuth was set up in Budapest. István Tóth sculpted the portrait, whose plinth bore a relief and an inscription commemorating the politician's arrest, although the relief has disappeared and was sculpted again by Tamás Varga in 1999.

Wesselényi, "the Boatman of the Deluge"

Of all natural disasters that had befallen Pest-Buda for centuries, the one claiming the greatest losses in life and property was the Great Pest Flood of 1838. Destroyed by the deluge were 2281 houses in Pest and 207 in Buda. Poet Vörösmarty strikes an elevated tone in his poem describing the "loss of the whilom city”: "Trembling and giving up its ghost did it go down / Into wild waves as it sank with a sigh in its fall.”

Water levels are marked by dozens of plaques at various points of the capital. Commemorating the event and paying tribute to its hero Baron Miklós Wesselényi, "the Boatman of the Deluge”, is a memorial slab by sculptor Barnabás Holló (1865-1917) on the wall of the Franciscan Church standing at where today's Kossuth Lajos utca begins in District V. Wesselényi recorded his floodtime experiences in his diary. According to the brief, factual, and yet vivid, account, "it was only with the greatest effort that one could sail by the ruins of the collapsed houses, the piled-up ice, the sticks of furniture, the broken beams, and all manner of other obstacles even as one was threatened by collapsing walls and falling roofs. Now to the left, now to the right and now behind us was a building torn down. It was only the booming, roaring, crackling noise made by these collapsing edifices that could possibly drown out from time to time the constant wailing and hoarse moaning of the flood victims begging woefully for help.”

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