Gerle János: Palaces of Money - Our Budapest (Budapest, 1994)

rooms on the first floor, that the bank opened its first offices. At that time the entire staff consisted of a cashier, a book-keeper, an assistant book-keeper, and a messenger. The bank’s cash, 72 thousand pengő- forints in the November of 1842, was kept in a coffer heavily reinforced with iron. The founder of the bank was Móricz Gllmann, and its president was Ferencz Örményi.

The bank grew continuously and extended sizeable credits to such newly founded Hungarian joint stock companies as the Central Railways or the Pest Roller Mill Company.

Lajos Kossuth, the Minister of Finance appointed during the 1848-49 War of Independence, not only inherited an almost empty treasury, but he also had to grapple with the problems of financing emergency defence expenses. The Pest Commercial Bank, virtually assuming the role of a central bank undertook, under a contract it signed with the Minister of Finance, to issue the so-called Kossuth notes in one and two forint denominations at first, and later, when economic pressures grew, to print five, ten and one hundred forint notes with no reserve behind them. These banknotes, which bore the name of the Commercial Bank among others, were issued from a printing shop set up in the Charles Barracks (today’s City Hall). Hungary’s defeat in the War of Independence was followed by a brief grace period during which the notes could be exchanged. When this period expired, the Kossuth notes were burnt under military supervision on the site of today’s Deák tér. The bank was crippled by the weight of financial demands made by the Austrian treasury, and Vienna would have been only too glad to liquidate the Hungarian institution and replace it by a Pest branch of the National Bank of Austria. And such a branch was indeed opened in 1851, but the board of directors and the members’ meeting managed to salvage the Commercial Bank, which was eventually freed from the consequences of its financial policies in support of the War of Independence by an act of clemency issued by Francis Joseph in 1854.

In 1861, the first independent head office of the Pest Hungarian Commercial Bank was erected on a plot where the recently demolished tithe office had stood in Színház tér (Theatre Square-today Vörösmarty tér). The building, which was designed by József Hild, also housed the simultaneously opened Pivorszky Coffee House, bought by Henrik Kugler in 1870. It was from Kugler that the establishment was inherited by his son15