Szatmári Gizella: Walks in the Castle District - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2001)

Hölbling’s house stood on the spot.) During the siege of 1945 and in 1956, too, the building sustained heavy damage. A large number of precious, irreplaceable documents were destroyed, including entire family archives. Reconstruction of the building was completed in the early 1960s.

The house at No. 5 Bécsi kapu tér was built around the end of the 18th century, during the reign of the “behatted”—because uncrowned—king of Hungary Joseph II. (On account of a similarity perceived between the ornamental festoons characterising it and the pigtailed wigs worn by Joseph’s court bureaucrats, the style, roughly the equivalent of what is referred to as Louis XVI elsewhere, came to be called Copf,, the Hungarian version of the German word Zopf, meaning plait.) From 1825 the house was owned by the captain of the city, Kristóf Szeth, together with the adjoining, more than fifty-year younger, building at No. 6. Standing in a niche on the level of the first floor, the statue of St. John of Nepomuk, martyr to the secret of the confessional and one of the most popular patron saints of Pest-Buda, has been guarding over the growing traffic in the square for 300 years now.

Piarist teacher and eminent scholar of Greek and Roman antiquity József Grigely was the author of several occasional poems written in praise of the royal house. His works included eulogies commemorating the marriage of Palatine Joseph and Alexandra Pavlovna (1800), or the arrival in Buda of Archduke Charles. On the front of his house at No. 7 Bécsi kapu tér, above the double window in the middle, there is a relief of Pallas Athena surrounded by medallions with the portraits of Classical authors: Virgil, Cicero, Livy, Quintilian, Seneca and Socrates. The long-dead master of stone-carving sculpted into reliefs the allegories of the arts and sciences, too. Perhaps it was this sight that gave the noted patron of the arts Lajos Hatvány the idea of buying the property in 1932. It was here that Hatvany’s famous “literary salon” received guests until 1938.

In the middle of Bécsi kapu tér stands the Kazinczy Memorial Fountain by János Pásztor. The statue of a girl guarding a devotional light in her right hand symbolises Ferenc Kazinczy’s activities as protector and inno10