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

few tombstones and a well from Matthias’s time decorated with an escutcheon are open to the public (the site is accessible from the direction of the Danube). The 15th-century tower of the cloister survives, complete with a late Gothic window with a curtain arch. In 1927 a replica of the Matthias monument of Bautzen was placed here. (As King of Bohemia, Matthias took the city of Bautzen and proceeded to restore and fortify the strategically positioned Castle of Ortenburg. His governor, the knight György Stein, had a slightly larger than life-size statue made of the king by an anonymous Silesian master in 1486 for the gatehouse, a work finished in Buda so that the features of the monarch would be true to life.)

The monastery must have been completed by 1254, since, according to documentary evidence, it was here that an assembly of the Dominican chapters was held.

A new wing was added to the monastery in 1305 to house a college called Studium generale. It was on the foundations of this that King Matthias intended to raise a University of Buda with the addition of a theological and a philosophical faculty. Gáspár Heltai discusses the king’s plans at length in his chronicle. After Turkish times a bakery and a grocery warehouse were established on the premises of the Dominican monastery and college. In 1784 a school was opened in the latter —hence the name of Iskola, or school, borne by the square until 1936. The school remained in operation for a century and a half until it was relocated in 1934 to Mészáros utca in District I, where it continued as Erzsébet Szilágyi Young Ladies’ Secondary School.

In 1688 a Jesuit centre designed by Konrád Ker- schensteiner was constructed between the Church of Our Lady and the Dominican Church. A school, or ‘gymnasium’ was located on the ground floor of the monastery. It remained in service until the dissolution of the order in 1773. For the next ten years the premises were used as a seminary, then the Royal Chamber was moved into the building (1784) and then, after 1867, the Ministry of Finance. The ruins of the building, which was burnt out in 1944-45, were cleared or converted, and a new Hilton Hotel opened in 1976.

The Vörös Sün, or House of the Red Hedgehog, named after the coat of arms above its gate (No. 3

17