Szablyár Péter: Step by step - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2010)

Memorials up and down the stairs: the Granite Steps

Following the noble example set by Teréz Brunszvik, he founded the National Association of Nursery Schools in 1872. Although he was quite a prolific writer, his work has been mostly forgotten by now. He died in Budapest on 14 January 1891.

Evoking the atmosphere of the Granite Stairs are the lines in which Sándor Márai, one of the most prominent authors of the 20th century and a writer ultimately caught up by an unworthy fate, recalls the memory of his home here that he had liked so well. Márai had lived from 1931 to 1945 at 2 Mikó utca, a house that had stood opposite these stairs until it was wiped out by a bomb falling on the building during the siege of Buda and destroying the writer's library of thousands of volumes. This is how he reminisces in his Ver&e& könyv (Book of Poems, 1945): "Sit down on the kerbstone here for now, / Where Granite Stairs cascaded down below. / Outside the window on a summer morn / The chestnut leaves all fluttered of their own accord / And as you wrote your novel behind the pane / At moments the sky opened up its dizzy deeps / To you, the poet, who at this no more weeps - / Have a good look for here / Was Mikó utca, a place forever dear.”

■ The founder oh the hint nunery dchoot in Hungary

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