Meskó Csaba: Thermal Baths - Our Budapest (Budapest, 1999)

their hospital and baths in the 12th century. The Turks used the medieval buildings found here as grain and gunpowder mills, which were driven by the power of the spring gushing forth incessantly in all seasons. (Remains of the tower above the gun-powder mill serve as foundations below one of today’s pools.) The well-liked alum steam bath of the Turkish nobility was all but forgotten after the retaking of Buda. Not even statistician Imre Palugyay has much to say about it in his work published in 1852 other than there was, in the courtyard of the mill near Császár Baths, a so-called “Lukáts bath, whose very few tubs are used mainly by rustics from the countryside for curative purposes”.

1884 marked a new turn in the history of the bath. It was in that year that Rezs Palotay purchased it from the treasury and made significant investments in order to build a modern baths here. In 1893 the Lukács Baths re-formed as a share company. Thereupon the mud bath was reconstructed, and a spa hotel was erected to which a public steam bath and an up-to-date department of hydrotherapy were added; the swimming pools were also rebuilt.

The name Lukács Baths is of uncertain derivation. Our forbears called it “lukas” (holed, punctured) bath, one reason for which was that the original, Turkish name was chukor-hamam, in which the element chukor meant pit.

The Császár Mill and Lukács Baths from Cassius’ book

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