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

No. 4 Fortuna utca housed the Fortuna Inn, whose name was meant to invoke the goddess of fortune and thus incur her favours. And favours were apparently granted, too, as the establishment standing above medieval cellars, a building of Louis XVI style at present, received its patrons for nearly two centuries between 1784 and 1868. Its sign was carved by Frigyes Held in 1786. It was Held "who restored, a few years later, the Holy Trinity Column, and the central altar of the Krisztinaváros Church is also his work (1796). Some sources identify the Fortuna Inn as the site where participants in Martinovics’s failed conspiracy regularly met in the early 1790s to prepare a republican uprising. They met in a “reading circle” attended by Hajnóczy, Szentmar- jay, Szolárcsik, Pál Őz and Ferenc Verseghy, ln 1850 some of the rooms were converted by Lajos Kimnach for the purposes of a drawing school and in 1868 the inn was closed. From 1876 onwards, the house accommodated “patrons” of a very different kind since it was converted into a courthouse including a gaol. Until 1930 the building housed the court of public administration. Its present-day function is of a friendlier nature, as it was here that the Museum of Hungarian Commerce and Catering opened in 1966. With the help of numerous valuable and unique objects, including shop-signs and furniture, the museum introduces the history of commerce and catering in the capital of Hungary. The street-sign was made by sculptor Sándor Kiss (1976).

The serenely harmonious neo-Classical fagade of

The houses of Fortuna utca

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