Gál Éva: Margaret Island - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2000)

The Artists’ Promenade

in 1926. In 1934 the entrance was removed to the facade overlooking the Danube, and this was later followed by further additions and modernisation carried out on the hotel (which was called Palatínus between the wars, as another homage to Joseph’s memory).

The huge grassy expanse south of the Grand Hotel, which was a nine-hole golf-course before 1945, is today the popular stretch of Nagyrét or Large Meadow, a spacious clearing lined with fine trees, groves and bushes.

Outside the Grand Hotel’s restaurant patio are three old black walnut trees, planted almost two hundred years ago. Walking south we see a beautiful horse-chestnut tree to the left of the esplanade; to the right is a decorative fern grove and a majestic old copper beech.

Leaving the Grand Hotel, we reach that part of Margaret Island where most of the island’s relics of Hungary’s historical past and the works of contemporary artists can be seen set among the park’s centuries-old trees, and local and foreign shrubs.

From here branch off the paths of what is called the Artists’ Promenade: it was along this walkway that the first few busts of the best-known Hungarian writers, poets, musicians, sculptors and other artists were set up in the 1960s. Of the forty-odd pieces erected in total, a good few have been vandalised or stolen, especially those made of bronze. Cast into this material or carved into

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