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

Committee of the Academy inviting replies to the query of how a Hungarian playhouse could be established in Pest." Fáy gave, in conjunction with Döb- rentei, a very practical answer to the question as the director of the theatrical company that moved from Kassa to Pest. He also worked for the Athenaeum, a magazine that appeared between 1837 and '43, and in 1840 he was among the founders of a society set up to raise funds for an impressive equestrian statue of King Matthias. It was not his fault that the great work was left unfinished when its creator Ferenczy retired, to his native Rimaszombat.

In his above-mentioned "reformer’s memoirs", Fáy suggested the establishment of a savings bank designed to provide financial security for craftsmen, smallholders and the common man in general. Having opened its first office on the premises of the County Hall in 1840, the Pest County Savings Bank developed into a comprehensive network of branch offices, which then continued to help the population of the city to increase its wealth in financial security for more than a hundred years. Made by Ferenc Csúcs, the plaque commemorating the bank's 125th anniversary was set up in 1965, on a wall of the building at 1-3 Vitkovics Mihály utca, District V.

The "Inn to The Eye of God"

Not far from the Disznófő restaurant, at what is now 3 Szilassy út in the Zug- liget area of District XII, once stood Károly Haggenmacher’s inn, an establishment whose attractions included "a garden of peerless beauty and a fishpond". The inn often entertained boarding guests. Among these was a young lawyer and politician by the name of Lajos Kossuth.

He did well to withdraw from his public activities, as publication of his Reportd from the Diet continued to appear in defiance of a ban imposed by the official censors on account of the repeated offence given by the reports’ style and contents to the refined sensibilities of the royal court. Such blatant disobedience could of course not go unpunished. In the early morning hours of 5 May 1837, court attorney Ignác Eötvös, Captain József Thurn and his 48 (!) grenadiers broke into Kossuth’s lodgings to arrest the rebel and escort him to the Joseph Bastion Barracks by the Vienna Gate in the Castle. The building now standing at 9 Táncsics Mihály utca bears a relief plaque commemorating the event.

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