Hajós György: Heroes' Square - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2001)

was also held here. The altar of the event was set up in front of the monument’s column to plans by architect Alfréd Bardon, who was later tenured as professor of the University of Technology. The most significant ecclesiastic event held here was the open-air High Mass pontificated by John Paul II, during his visit to Hungary in August 1991.

It was also in Heroes’ Square that the nation took its last leave of its martyrs: a leading figure of the resistance movement Endre Bajcsy-Zsilinszky, who was executed under the reign of the Arrowcross government on 27 May 1945 and then interred, as he had wished, at Tarpa; on 16 June 1989, the exhumed body of the late Imre Nagy, the prime minister of the nation during its revolution, who was then executed in 1958, lay in state here together with many others sharing his martyrdom.

For the purposes of events moving large crowds, the paved surfaces of the square had to be enlarged. Vegetation, fountains, expanses of water all had to go one after the other. In 1938 the square was given hard pavement and the strip in front of the statues of the chieftains received ornamental covering. Although the paving destroyed during World War II was replaced in the 1950s, this new covering had also been worn away by the 1970s. In 1980 a larger surface was paved over, though parts of the original patterns of the middle section were retained.

Road traffic was diverted to the section behind the colonnades of the monument. When Felvonulási tér, or Square of Marches, was created in the 1950s, another large part of the greenery of the City Park was annexed. The side faqade of the Exhibition Hall came to flank Dózsa György út and, with the disappearance of the green spot determining the character of the square’s corner, Heroes’ Square and Felvonulási tér were conjoined.

The building on the corner of Andrássy út and Heroes’ Square, a construction erected to plans by Aladár Árkay in 1905 and called Villa Babochay (today’s Yugoslav Embassy), was a fine example of the new tonalities of modern architecture. Influenced in its mass and ornamentation by the work of Ödön Lechner and

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