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

The MTK-stadiüm

with an enthusiasm for sport and a great deal of inventiveness. Cinder such circumstances, it must have seemed a daring enterprise for the club to purchase an almost ten acre land in 1911 for a sports complex on what was known as the Graveyard Slopes not far from the woods called Pékerdő where the first ever, bonecracking, football match was played in Budapest. As a tender submitted by Elemér Goll and Frigyes Werner envisaged, “the entire surface of the football pitch will be sodded and piped, and the construction of two huge grandstands will begin; the latter, together with the stairs branching out from it, will have a combined capacity of 25,000 spectators. Later a semi-circular curve of terraces will be added to connect the standing space and the grandstands and thus further increase capacity.” What was even more miraculous than this plan was that it was in fact realised in half a year’s time and the complex was inaugurated on 31 March 1912. By that time the stadium with a capacity of 20,000 (and later even more) spectators and a sodded, 110 by 64 metre football pitch area had been completed, together with an athletics track suitable for international events. The following year the club house was built to plans by Károly Markovics. The competition with Ferencváros now involved the stadia as well as the teams. One set of terraces was built after the other, each larger and more beautiful than the previous one, now on Üllői út, now on Hungária körút, meant as much to nettle the perennial rival as to make room for more fans. By the 1930s, when the professional athletes of MTK

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