Gál Éva: Margaret Island - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2000)
However, there is now no hope of ever discovering two more medieval buildings of the island, the Knights Hospitalers’ and the Archbishop of Esztergom’s castle. Parts of the thick foundation wall of the former, enclosing a huge area in the south of the island, were not only visible at the time of Palatine Joseph, but even later, when the construction of the restaurant on the lower island was begun in 1869; some of the walls are likely to have been used for the construction. The Archbishop’s castle fell, via a kind of property- exchange, into the hands of some noble lords at the end of the thirteenth century, and in a document issued under Louis the Great in 1355 it is referred to as a ruinous castle (dirutum castrum). What might have survived this—perhaps the strong, more than a hundred yard- long-wall by the bank belonging to the castle—was destroyed, at the latest, when Árpád Bridge was built. Nevertheless, excavations carried out in 1957 and supervised by archaeologist Rózsa Tóth Feuer uncovered some time-worn foundation walls buried in the ground about four yards below the surface on the hypothetical area of the castle. The same digs found a terrazzo floor-level with some twelfth or thirteenth-century ceramic fragments. Looming above the treetops, almost directly across the site where the ruins of the Church of the Blessed Virgin are, to the left of the walkway and around the middle of the island stands a water tower built in 1911. Designed by Szilárd Zielinski, professor of engineering at the Budapest University of Technology, and built with the method known as monolithic ferro-concrete construction, the tower represents the most advanced technology of its age. What makes the 57 metre tall structure appear light are its modest Art Nouveau decoration and its various sections. The tower is a protected monument of the country’s industrial heritage. No longer playing any part in providing the island with water, it was in use as a look-out tower and exhibition hall until quite recently. The Margaret Island Open-Air Theatre by the water tower was built in the record time of 19 weeks. Its designer, Péter Kaffka, built a 3500-seat, steep auditorium, a 54
