Buza Péter: Spring and Fountains - Our Budapest (Budapest, 1994)

Hebe-Artemis im Úri ütca

been the only candidate for being moved whenever the installation of a new statue in the Castle District was being decided, was then moved again; this time to a school yard.

Before the war an article appeared in Budai Krónika [Buda Chronicle] giving voice to one writer’s grief over the fate of the sculpture. The story’s subtitle clearly expresses the journalist’s wish: “Let us save this masterpiece of Hungarian iron casting”. By then rust had for years been eating away at Hebe-Artemis, which stood on its catafalque of old plinth-stones. The same article reports a hypothesis propounded by Béla Borsodi Bevilaqua, a not always reliable chronicler of the city, that the sculpture might have been made by Mátyás Bakó, the famous designer working at the Munkács Iron Foundry, the heyday of which had indeed coincided with the period in which the casting was made).

This journalistic plea for pardon did have some effect as the casting was taken to the Nagytétény Mansion Museum from where it was brought back, when times changed for the better,

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