Szablyár Péter: Step by step - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2010)
But the stairs — to church school gaol Lookout tower raised seat — are inside us, Radiating and "wearing away within"... Gáspár Nagy Yes, they are. They are wearing away inside us. Maybe it was when they first stood up to walk erect that it first occurred to our ancestors to make the climbing of steep slopes easier by cutting steps into the hillside. Pallas Nagylexikon, Hungary's classic encyclopaedia (1893-97), defines a stairway as a construction: "dividing vertical distances by breaking them down into smaller units, or steps, each equalling the length of a footstep." The country’s technological encyclopaedia (Műszaki Lexikon. 1972) has a more detailed definition to offer: "It is a construction meant to bridge a vertical distance and, with its pitch-line rate of 200—45° facilitates the simple and natural descent and ascent of persons treading on steps or stairs." Used more frequently than most other basic structural elements, a stairway, this simple construction, is an essential architectural feature of our daily lives. There are stairways in the front and in the back; there are interior and exterior stairs, garden stairs, terrain stairs, and outside stairs; stairways can run along a straight axis, a curving or a broken axis; they can have single or double flights and they can be constructed in spiral or helical arrangements. They can be made of iron, steel, wood, stone, artificial stone or concrete. In spite of the fact that the hilly terrain of the right bank of the Danube would require an abundance of stairs, there are no great numbers of public stairways in Budapest: no more than some fifty can be counted all over the capital. Nearly half of these can be found on the Castle Hill of Buda, where they are scattered around the hillside with varying density. Perhaps it is due to its ancient structural makeup that there is always something mystical about a stairway. It invariably leads from one point to another, allowing one to mount an elevation, to ascend or - owing to the rhythm of its regulated dimensions — to descend. Its moving, twentieth-century, variant — the escalator — snakes into the depths or raises one to street level or to a higher floor, allowing one to look around in a leisurely way while riding on its back. The reader who is ready to take a walk around the world of Budapest's stairways can believe this-, after the first such stroll, he or she will set foot upon their steps in an entirely different mindset, or they will come to miss the ones which are no longer in place. 5
