Zeidler Miklós: Sporting Spaces - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2000)

Budapest. One patterned on the other, these facilities were built in the first half of the century to be “strung” like so many beads or pearls on the roadway bordering the city. And indeed, some of them are veritable gems of the capital’s sporting life and have duly become cul- tic places of sorts.

The Ferencváros Gymnastics Club

(No. 129 Üllői út, district IX)

The first football players of the Franzstadt literally kicked up a dust in Rezső tér and the empty sites in the vicinity of the Technical University, the precise choice depending on where the policeman on duty had driven them away from. Then in 1899, municipal architect István Ochmann selected a plot with a more-or-less even surface on Soroksári út to be the first official football pitch of FTC (short for the Hungarian original of Ferencváros Gymnastics Club). This is how Aladár Mattyók, member of the board of directors, describes the facility in an issue of the club’s almanac: “The wooden hut serving as a dressing facility and the so-called terraces were built by master carpenter Tamás Antony the following spring. The latter consisted of a few pews built

Forty thousand spectators on the üllői út stadium (cca. 1930)

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