Buza Péter - Gadányi György: Towering Aspirations - Our Budapest (Budapest, 1998)

18 József Attila utca, district V

Antal Mocsonyi’s apartment mansion was built at the intersection of Sas utca and what was then Fürdő utca opposite Erzsébet tér. In its vicinity there are several buildings (for example Naum Derra's neo-Classical building at the corner of Október 6 utca next door) whose appearance in this very neighbourhood well demonstrates the direction in which the ancient, self-styled Greek merchants who had acquired their fortunes in Reform Age Pest expanded their quarters. The first members of this community lived in today’s Galamb utca and its immediate vicinity, where their beautiful church with one of its two towers truncated stands facing the Danube.

These Greeks of Pest, who had begun to settle here in large numbers in the mid-18th century, were in reality Macedonians and Vlachs (called Cincars by the ancient citizenry of Pest) and were an ethnic mixture from the Balkans with a common religion and similar livelihood rather than a shared national background. Such people dominated key trading positions in the southern regions. This, in turn, was the main source of their wealth accumulated in just a few decades as well as the basis of their social prestige and the concomitant change in their status in the city. In 1873, the year of the city’s unification, the Mocso- nyis (Sándor, Zénó, Antal senior and other family members) paid a house tax to the amount of 17,000 forints, which fact secured them first place among all other Greeks who had by that time invested a significant proportion of their fortunes in real estate in Pest.

Antal Mocsonyi’s fine looking apartment mansion was erected to plans by Károly Rainer (he was commissioned as the winner of a tender competition, the prospective landlord here applying a method normally used only for public buildings).

Rainer was commissioned in 1907 and in 1910 the first tenants were able to move in.

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