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

now housed) was the home of the “naturalised Hungarian subject”, the French colonel, “Antal” De la Motte des Aulnois. The present facade was probably put in by his son, a military engineer.

The Castle District’s first pharmacy, “To the Golden Unicorn”, was established by Ferenc Bösinger in 1687 in his house which stood at No. 1-2 Dísz tér. Before 1696, he moved into a building across the square and by 1740 the chemist’s was already housed at No. 16, later at No. 18, Tárnok utca and had been renamed the “The Golden Eagle”. It was here that a pharmacy museum was opened in 1974, and the functioning chemist’s itself was moved back to its former location at No. 16 Dísz tér, retaining its name “The Golden Eagle”. (Today this is an apartment house in 19th-century eclectic Revivalist style, on the spot where a Baroque building stood in the 18th century.)

(An interesting gloss on the history of the pharmacy museum is the fact that the building at No. 18 or 20 Tárnok utca belonged, according to oral tradition, to Peter Strudel von Strudendorff, an Austrian painter and sculptor, the founder-director of the Vienna Academy of Art at the turn of the 17th century. Mária Vida conjectures that the painting with figurái scenes and ornamental motifs decorating the interior of the pharmacy museum was the work of von Strudendorf.)

The Chief Army Commander’s Headquarters built in 1896 on the spot of the former Lutheran church, which was demolished a year earlier, (see Bécsi kapu tér above) was at No. 17 Tárnok utca. The back tract of the building was built into the (now ruined) Ministry of Defence.

In the middle of the square stands the “Honvéd” Memorial (honvéd, meaning “defender of the homeland” refers to a member of the insurrectionary army of 1848-49). The Historicist-Romantic statue by György Zala (1893) is a reminder of a significant event in the War of Independence, celebrating the Hungarian soldiers who recaptured the Castle from the occupying Austrian forces with the siege of 21 May 1849. Hungária, the winged female figure personifying the country, lays a wreath of laurels on the head of the soldier. The central figure, a flag-bearer, steps heavily on a gun-barrel in the manner of St. George treading on the dragon. The

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