Juhász Gyula - Szántó András: Hotels - Our Budapest (Budapest, 1999)

The Hotel Gellert in the 1920s

The centre of this Art Nouveau hotel building is a huge dome-topped hall. On the two sides of the majestic portal on the front overlooking the Danube are one of the hotel’s restaurants and its café. Its gallery-girdled foyer and its other communal spaces were shaped by the hands of the leading practitioners of the applied arts in the period.

Nothing was wanting here - the hotel had a ladies’ parlour, a study, a library, a music hall and an outdoor restaurant with a terrace offering a view of Gellért Hill. The five-storey hotel boasted, from 1927 on, as many as 230 rooms. Not only the obligatory hot and cold water was laid on in the bathrooms of the suites, but even thermal and mineral water from the baths ran from the taps. After all, the Gellért was supposed to be a medical facility, too, where many of the guests sought recovery from some ailment or another. The hotel and the baths were connected in a logical manner. The ground floor of the building containing the baths was, due to the declivity of the rock surface, level with the first floor of the hotel wing.

As the hotel was inaugurated in the last years of World War I, its first guests were the political officials of the Hungarian Republic of Soviets, who were later succeeded by the commanders of the Romanian military occupying Hungary. These were then followed by admiral Horthy’s chiefs of staff who were also billeted here.

In the years of peace the Gellért took the position that it had been meant to fill in the first place, becoming as it did the “number one” hotel of the capital. Between the wars, under chef János Gundel the restaurant of the hotel

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