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

Spiral stairs cast in iron

■ Cast-iron spiral stain in the Foundry Museum

exhibitions. Since then the staff of the museum keep a watchful eye on the fate of cast-iron stairs in Hungary, discovering one specimen after the other of this stairway-type of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Two ecclesiastic pieces also deserve mention here. One of them, the ornamental spiral staircase designed by Ludwig Förster and leading up to the pulpit of the Dohány utca Synagogue, a temple opened ceremonially in 1859, is one of the period's finest pieces. Another, less richly adorned but nevertheless also visually very striking specimen to be found within Budapest is one made in 1922 — the stairway leading up to the gallery of the Central Calvinist Church of Pesterzsébet.

Steps as street-level markers

Motorists turning off Elizabeth Bridge on the Buda side and then stopping to wait for the lights to turn at the busy junction of the road by the Danube bank can have a good look at a peculiar old building with a relief above its gate representing a

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