Szatmári Gizella: Walks in the Castle District - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2001)
done by Hölbling with the sculptural decoration being made by Antal Hörger. What made its instalment necessary was a petition made by the citizenry. The burghers of Buda requested that the holy relic of St. John the Charitable be returned to Buda from where the object of veneration, once received by Matthias as a gift from the Ottoman Sultan, had been removed to the safety of Pozsony after the disastrous defeat of the Hungarian Army by the Turks at the Battle of Mohács in 1526. The monarch ordered that the right foot of the saint be severed and only this be taken back to Buda (the rest was to be left in the care of Pozsony). These orders were carried out faithfully and the relic remained in the Town Hall until Joseph II had the chapel closed (in 1785). Thereupon it was taken to the Church of Our Lady (Matthias Church) where it is kept today in St. Stephen’s Chapel. A clock-and-bell tower was raised above the chapel in 1718. This was followed by an extension towards Úri utca added to the building by Máté Nepauer between 1770 and 1774. The building is noted for the fact that General Artúr Görgey spent a week here in May 1849, after recapturing the castle from the Austrian forces. It functioned as a town hall until the unification of Pest and Buda when the municipality of District I moved into the premises. After the serious damage sustained during World War II had been repaired, the building housed the Castle Museum—a branch of the Medieval Department of the Budapest History Museum—which was succeeded by the Museum of the Labour Movement and the Linguistics Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Today it is occupied by Collegium Budapest—Institute of Advanced Studies, an international research centre specialising in theoretical endeavour. Outside the Town Hall—in fact in a niche at one corner—is a statue, sculpted by the Lugano-born artist Carlo Adami (1785), of Pallas Athena with a shield featuring Buda’s coat of arms (the spear is sometimes stolen from her hand...). During his stay in Hungary, Adami worked in Eger and later in Süttő. His Pallas Athena began her career adorning a well. The first statue for the well outside the Town Hall (the water for which was conveyed by a duct commissioned by King 38
