Gábor Eszter: Andrássy Avenue – Our Budapest (Budapest, 2002)

■ Oktogon

The squares named after Ferenc Liszt and Mór

Jókai, which

is across the street, were formed when the final section of the former Factory Street was broadened out at the time Sugárút

was

under construction. Beneath the trees there were fountains right from the start, but these spaces cried out for statues to be erected here. It was in Jókai

tér that

the statue of Jókai

by

Alajos

Stróbl —

the writer seated in an armchair — was erected, the original auxiliary figures called Girls Reading being placed in the City Park. In the mid-fifties, in the place of the Lechner statue in Liszt Ferenc tér,

there

appeared one of Endre Ady. The same Géza Csorba who,

in the interwar period, had sculpted what was perhaps the finest shrine to commemorate the poet (in the Kerepesi

Cemetery)

made a rigid, spuriously monumental work this time. (The blame perhaps lies not with the artist but with the false expectations of the period.) Later on László

Marton

’s statue of Ferenc Liszt was placed near the middle of the square near the junction with Paulay Ede

utca, while

another work of Stróbl,

also

representing Liszt, is a bit further away, above the main entrance of the Academy of Music.

One block down the avenue,"... we set to an octagonal square harmed at the junction with the Great Boulevard to be conhronted with hour identical and somewhat overly seometric comer buildings with brick walls." says a guide to Budapest oh 1886. "This is the Oktoson. The Octagonal." says the above-quoted Lajos Hevesi.

"Let

us hope that the seometric name will soon be discarded hor the sake oh another with a more patriotic sound." (The 29