Szatmári Gizella: Walks in the Castle District - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2001)

ler Louis Cartier, husband of Countess Jacqueline Erzsébet Mária Almássy. It was also here that Árpád Tóth died in 1928. The poet’s memory is kept alive in the Castle District by a promenade named after him and a plaque.

The building at No. 10 is decorated with a shell and a vase in a niche upstairs, and an ornamental stucco on its faqade.

According to László Zolnay’s examination of its medieval wall remains, No. 9 Táncsics Mihály utca, in the heart of the civilian area, used to be the site of the Magna Curia Regis, or royal residence. Centuries later, in the Habsburg era, this became the Joseph Barracks, its original armoury serving as a prison from 1810. It was called the Stockhaus, or Punishment Centre. For their anti-state, subversive (or anti-Habsburg, patriotic) activities a number of well-known personalities served time here, including Miklós Wesselényi, Mihály Táncsics (twice, in 1848 and 1860), Lajos Kossuth, Lajos Batthyány and Gergely Czuczor. There are plaques recalling the imprisonment of Táncsics and Kossuth, the work of János Istók (1948) and Lajos Berán (1940) respectively. In 1863 the writer Jókai was convicted for libel after a critical article he had written about the Schmerling system for Count Nándor Zichy’s journal A Hon. He was sentenced to be confined in irons for one year, and he was fined a thousand forints. The count undertook to pay the fine and, in the end, Jókai served just one month.

No. 9 is where Táncsics, whose memory is preserved by the name of the street as well as by a life-size statue outside the Vienna Gate by the noted sculptor Imre Varga (1968), wrote his book Fővárosunk (Our Capital), a work of considerable interest to urban developers.

Before World War II, the building housed the Ministry of Finance. At the moment it is the property of an American owner.

The stately Baroque Erdődy Mansion (No. 7) was built to plans by Máté Nepauer between 1750 and 1769. In 1696 the building here, which occupied the space once taken up by two medieval houses, belonged to sculptor and stone-cutter Bernardo Feretti, who built the first Trinity monument of Buda. According to urban historian Arnold Schoen, former director of the Buda14