Szatmári Gizella: Signs of Remembrance - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2005)

■ The nun who fiUti through the wall

flight frozen into stone, is the memory of the former tenants of the building who used it as their convent — the Poor Clares.

As reported by the Vienna Diarium in 1719, Eleanor Maria Theresa, the widow of Emperor Leopold I, decreed that the Poor Clares be allowed to take up residence, on their return to Hungary after their escape from the Turks, in their house on the corner of Kapisztrán tér. The building, which was a smaller palace built in Gothic style, had been owned by the order even before the Turkish occupation of Hungary. The arrival of Abbess Franciska Csáky and her sisters in their new home was greeted by the flair of trumpets and the beating of drums. The august patroness was represented in the person of General Löffelholz’s widow. The sisters, numbering no more than forty, lived quiet, contemplative lives here enabling them to engage in their peaceful activities, which probably included the education of young women. This gentle existence ended around 1782, when Joseph II, Hungary’s uncrowned, or "behatted", king disbanded their order and confiscated their property. The sacred relics in their possession were deposited, permanently as they hoped, in the nearby church of the Franciscans, while the building was turned to new purposes: at first it housed the country’s parliament, later to be appropriated for the national archives. (The latter was

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