Buza Péter: Spring and Fountains - Our Budapest (Budapest, 1994)
garian banking world to sponsor a municipal project, looked elegant and promised well, especially for the savings bank. It should be mentioned here that the competition for the tender had a preliminary round. The municipality wanted to broaden this section of the street now called Károlyi Mihály utca by four metres and the facade overlooking it was doomed to be demolished. Thankfully, some resourceful originator of ideas found a way out of this plight: the bank should oblige the city which might then abandon its monstrous plan. And that is what happened. Or, not quite that, since the work was neither erected in the place of the Fountain of Nereids, nor was it built when the first offer was registered. The municipality saw clearly that there was no point in erecting this fountain, which would require large quantities of water, before a mains system providing an even supply of water was installed. By the time the system had indeed been completed some ten years later, the parties concerned decided that the fountain should be placed in Kálvin tér, where the bank had, in the meantime, built an apartment block to house its new branch office. Another legend of a later date explains the change of location by suggesting that the local council planned the first public convenience for Kálvin tér, and the First Domestic, not being very enthusiastic about such an institution in its neighbourhood, made an alternative offer to supplant these plans. No documented evidence supports this assumption, but it is a fact that the first public lavatory was actually opened in Deák tér. The invitation for competitors gave May 1879 as the deadline for tenders to be entered. The jury judged 16 works by 15 artists. The winners of the first and second prizes were Gyula Czigler and Gyula Benczúr. Czigler’s plan, codenamed “Triton”, involved an obelisk and tritons carved by the contractor, and was commended on account of its clever water play. Benczur’s work, entitled “Water is an ambiguous element, which floods the earth but also sustains it”, was, in spite of the Baroque-like complexity of its title, a remarkably unpretentious composition described as an “ordinary marketplace well” by one contemporary critic, who was not impressed either by the "over-adorned obelisk in the middle of the huge and high basin”. However, the “board of trustees for the fountain project” threw out the plans awarded by the jury and decided to commission Miklós Ybl to design the work. In any case, Ybl himself had entered his design entitled “Duna” in the competition, which was very similar to the blueprint that was eventually realised. By August the master had delivered the new version, which was duly accepted by the board, whose members were delegated by the city. Construction work could thus commence 36
