Szablyár Péter: Step by step - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2010)

Royal Stairs - stairways in Várkert (Castle Garden)

■ The Jeiuit Stain

The "side stairs" of the Fishermen's Bastion: the Jesuit Stairway

It is beneath the southern tower of the Fishermen's Bastion envisaged by Schulek where the Jesuit Stairs go down to the Víziváros, or Watertown quarter. Its lower, unroofed section makes a shortcut where Hunyadi János út takes a large U-turn to continue to the groundwall of the southern tower of the Fishermen's Bastion. Walking along a short horizontal stretch from here on, one will arrive at a gateway decorated with geometrical ornaments and a relief featuring a Gothic stone lion supposedly brought here from a Romanesque church. Passing through the gateway, one enters the roofed section of the stairs. The stairway was known by a variety of names including Lion Stairs, Covered Corridor, and Jacob's Stairs. In the fifties of the last century, the clerical-sounding name of Jesuit Stairs was replaced with Fishermen's Stairs, it used to go to the Jesuit monastery and school by the Church of Our Lady, buildings demolished in the 19th century. That is what the name commemorates - and will now perhaps go on commemorating for some time to come.

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