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

View of Margaret Island and the Buda Islet in the 1860s

here—this shrubby sand bank was only connected to Margaret Island at the end of the nineteenth century, when the small branch of the river separating them was blocked to be gradually filled up. Margaret Island was much shorter at its northern end, too, than it is now, and to the west it hardly reached beyond the line of today’s carriageway. It assumed its present shape gradually, following the embankment of its southern tip together with the construction of the branch bridge connecting the island with Margaret Bridge (1900), the enforcement with a stone wall of its western bank finished by the late 1920s, and the completion of the flood-control works when the northernmost tip was extended in connection with the construction of the Árpád Bridge. Consequently, the sometimes destructive, sometimes constructive work of the river can no longer change either the size or the shape of the island. It was not always like that, of course. There are opinions according to which the islet, in fact a largish sandbank, called Bath Island once lying to the northeast and dredged away in 1873 might also have been connected to Margaret Island. (Bath Island owed its name to the fact that some 50-60 thermal springs welled up from the depths of the river bed on its area. Several nineteenth-century sources claim that remains of baths built of stone and marble and believed to date back to Roman times were in evidence here as late as the 1850s.)

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