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

Ages the square bore the name of the local church’s patron saint and thus was called Szent György tér, or St. George’s Square.)

The name it goes by today is under official protection. Inscribed around the letter D, drawn in the manner of illuminated initials, on András Faragó and András Nagy’s granite plaque sunk in the wall of No. 8 in 1973, is a text explaining the history of the square.

The numbering of the houses follows a circular pattern: Nos. 1 -2 are followed by No. 3 to its the left, and the numbers grow anti-clockwise ending at the Korona café.

On the site of No. 1-2 Dísz tér there was a residential house in the 15th century owned first by Péter Váradi, and then by Tamás Bakócz, Archbishops of Kalocsa and Esztergom respectively. After 1686 it belonged to Ferenc Ignác Bösinger, apothecary and Mayor of Buda. Later it was here that the building of the Foreign Ministry stood. The edifice was so badly damaged in 1945 that it had to be demolished.

What is now a three-storey building at No. 3 was designed by Venerio Ceresola after 1686 for István Wer- lein, Commissioner for the Royal Chamber. Werlein wielded great power as the man commissioned by the Vienna Chamber and Emperor Leopold himself to supervise the reconstruction of Buda. In 1748 the house already belonged to Palatine Lajos Batthyány.

The Batthyány family also owned the so-called “Kremsmünster” house at No. 4-5 Dísz tér. Its previous proprietor, Abbot of Kremsmünster Ehrenbert Schre- vogel, had bought it in the summer of 1687. Cardinal Angelo Rótta, the Apostolic Nuncio, lived here between 1930 and 1945. A plaque commemorates the war-time activities of the Nuncio, the Vatican’s ambassador, who went to great lengths to save the lives of Jews and others. A further plaque is devoted to the memory of another Batthyány, Prince László Batthyány-Strattmann, who treated a host of needy patients free of charge as an eye specialist at the hospital of Körmend which he had established.

The house at No. 6 was once the home of Lajos Arányi, who suggested the marking of the buildings in the Castle District with explanatory tablets in 1864 (see garrison church, Kapisztrán tér). The Komárom-born

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