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

gold pieces per annum in recognition of the city’s proprietorial rights (the sum was modified to 50 forints in 1949), and the state should not use the area for any purpose other than building the museum. Furthermore, the contract stipulated that the museum be open free of charge on Sundays and public holidays and on at least one weekday every week.

Tenders for the designs of the building were invited on 14 September 1898.

The construction of museums presented Hungary’s architects with a fundamentally new challenge in the last decade of the 19th century. One single museum, the National Museum, had been raised before the period of the Compromise of 1867, and only the Museum of Applied Arts, a construction designed by Ödön Lech- ner, and the middle section of the Aquincum Museum were built in the last decade of the century (aside from a museum in Nagyvárad and Marosvásárhely each). In default of domestic experience, the prototypes to be relied on had to be the practice of designing and building museums in western Europe. The last two decades of the 19th century saw the construction of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna (1872-1890), the Bode Museum in Berlin (1882), the Carlsberg Glyptothek (1892-1906) and the Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen, a new wing added to the British Museum in London (1884), the Rijksmuseum (1885) and the

The Museum of Fine Arts in 1909 on a postcard

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