Boros Géza: Statue Park - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2002)

The main façace wall

I Wreath-laying ceremony on the centenary of) Lenin'& birth, in igyo

the Soviet Union stood in a huge square by the City Park called Felvonulási tér (Parade Ground Square) on a spot where "hundreds of thousands pledged allegiance to the high principles of Leninism on red-letter holidays”.

The erection of the statue was regarded as the first step of extending Heroes' Square in a grandiose project of forming a huge new public space. An enormous obelisk covered with red marble stood behind the statue to give it architectonic emphasis. The height of the structure, designed by Károly Weichinger, was flush with the imaginary level of the future National Theatre, which was meant to be raised next to it.

"The location, size and arrangement of the statue are a distant echo of the Stalin statue toppled earlier. There were differences, though. Sándor Mikus’s work was an enormous figure standing on a four-metre high plinth in the middle axis of a broad tribune sprawling for twenty-four metres. Pátzay's Lenin, on the other hand, stood on a stepped, flattened-out plinth raised only about two metres above ground level and itself about half the size of the Stalin figure with its mere four-metre height. Behind it, however, was a seventeen-metre tall,

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