Faurest, Kristin: Ten spaces - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2010)
Teleki László tér
to nursing mothers - women were borrowing infants from their neighbours in order to secure a better place in line. The interwar years weren’t easy, either. In between the two wars the unemployed and unskilled waited endlessly for day labour here, even sleeping under the open sky. In the 1920s there was a surfeit of unskilled or low-skilled migrant workers (known in Hungarian as kubikus) who were somewhere between agricultural and industrial, working building the railways, flood prevention, and other heavy labour. An outraged newspaper column in 1930 described how a professional association of antiques dealers at Teleki tér had banded together to get the authorities to ban vendors without licenses - that is, the poor rag and used goods peddlers — from the market. This became a huge problem for the poorest of the poor — both the buyers and sellers — since none of them had any other means of making money and did not have access to legitimate licenses. Until now the poor had freely peddled rags and shabby used wares cheaply and without license. Since the ban, for those who still dared to sell, the penalty was arrest and/or a four pengő fine, equivalent to a week’s family budget at the time. The article argued that the regulation in fact ■ The Teleki tér market, as it looked in 1946 50
