Prohászka László: Equestrian Statues - Our Budapest (Budapest, 1997)

Scale model of the war carriage from the monument of the War of Independence

ue had been unveiled, nobody thought that almost thirty years would pass before another large, cast bronze equestrian monument would be inaugurated. As early as 1907, plans were completed for an imposing sculptural group to commemorate the 1848-49 War of Independence. What sculptors István and Ödön Gách envisaged was a huge, carved limestone monument with a larger than life-size, cast bronze war carriage in the space before it. The biga, whose scale model is kept in the Museum of Military History (on Tóth Árpád sétány, in the Castle District), was described by Károly Lyka with these words: “The two stallions of the supreme Warlord race over heaps of dead bodies, the horses’ limbs moved by a mad rage, with passion tuned to its highest intensity. The whole composition confronts the bland, bloodless pathos of so many other historical statues.” Regrettably, the monument, which was meant for the centre of Szabadság tér, would never be completed. The country’s dynamic economic development, accompanied by a similar artistic vitality, was halted by the outbreak of World War 1 in 1914.

Although the war effort put crippling loads on Hungary,

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