Szatmári Gizella: Walks in the Castle District - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2001)
professor of pathology, whose youthful ambitions included becoming first a hermit and then a missionary, was particularly sensitive to the preservation of valuable historic monuments. He noted with disapproval in his records that the men working on the reconstruction of the building at No. 7 had found carved stones with Turkish and Hebrew writing on them, but walled the pieces in with the inscriptions facing inward, thus virtually destroying the valuable find. The modern building at No. 8 Dísz tér rises above the spot of the former Marczibányi Mansion. The edifice, which boasted an imposing Louis XVI style facade, was pulled down in 1910 to clear the ground for a five- storey Art Nouveau apartment block. The latter was reduced to rubble in 1945. The plaque with a relief by Lilla Kunvári (1954) on the side-fagade of the building at No. 9 Dísz tér is devoted to the memory of novelist Ferenc Móra, after whom the side street here is named. Móra lived here as a university student after 1897 with literary historian Sándor Péterffy, at what was No. 2 Casino utca at the time. After 1686, the building (at No. 9) belonged to chimney-sweep Péter Pál Franczin, who built the “Chimneysweep” Chapel on the spot of today’s Krisztinaváros Church. The street led to the above-mentioned Marczibányi Mansion, where the Buda Castle Casino Club was housed. The building at No. 11 Dísz tér was owned by the acclaimed builder and town senator Venerio Ceresola from 1688. The neo-Classical building at No. 13 is decorated with three small reliefs. The former proprietor derived the subject of the pieces from Greco-Roman mythology: the figures of Diana, goddess of hunting, Rhea Silvia begging for the lives of Rome’s founders, her sons Romulus and Remus, and Pallas Athena, patroness of poets, scholars and philosophers, can be seen above the upstairs windows. The son and widow of Mayor Péter Salgáry used to live here. The house was owned by the Salgárys as recently as the 19th century. It received its present neo-Classical appearance during reconstruction in 1815. In 1790 the two-storey Baroque building at No. 15 (where the State Curatorship of Historic Monuments is 59
