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

the Archbishopric Library), which, as Margit Beke's scholarly article demonstrates, is an important contribution to the emergence of the Hungarian vernacular as a literary tool as well as remaining a source of spiritual nourishment to its user.

Thalia’s Hungarian Temple

Pasha Djami, a mosque which had been the medieval monastery of the Carmelite order, was destroyed when Buda was recaptured from the Turks in 1686. The Carmelites undertook its reconstruction in 1725, and the inscription "Karmelita udvar’’, or Carmelite Yard, is still in evidence above the entrance. The building was consecrated in 1736. However, hardly fifty years passed before Joseph 11 dissolved the order in 1784. As the crownless king had moved a whole range of government offices to Buda from Vienna and the court bureaucracy wanted entertainment, Joseph decreed the conversion of the church into a theatre. The refectory of the former monastery was rebuilt as a casino. Commission for constructing the theatre was given to master builder Kristóf Hikisch and Farkas Kempelen, the polymath renowned for the invention of a chess- machine. The two carried out their contract in a comparatively short time. They turned the cells of the cloister into dressing rooms, opened traptloors into the crypt (after the removal of the remains of the dead originally buried here to a nearby cemetery) and installed the stage to the spot where the altar had stood. Miklós Horler believes that the organ was taken to the St. Anna Church in the Water Town, and the bells were melted down to be recast as cannons. On 17 October 1787, the theatre was inaugurated with a German-language play.

It was here on 25 October 1790 that the first Hungarian-language theatrical performance was staged, by László Kemenes’s Hungarian National Stage Company. Kemenes’s actors performed the play Mr. Trueman, a Good and Gracioui Father by Kristóf Simái, a Rév-Komárom-born Piarist teacher. Simái, who was a member of the circle of reformist intellectuals headed by Batsányi and Kazinczy, had already had some considerable experience as a playwright. His most popular piece Homemade Medicine, "a comical play of much hilarity", had been performed as many as 27 times by professional companies. After Mr. Trueman, the company produced plays by Kotzebue and Schikaneder, but the (first) Hungarian opera and Romeo and Juliet, which was the first Shakespearean per2/