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

Weight container (1 7th century)

by apothecary József Rettig. There is just one doorframe recalling reconstruction in late Baroque style, but on its Anna utca fagade there is a smaller, walled- in Gothic door. It is here that the pharmacy museum is housed.

Pál Pátzay’s female-figure fountain was placed outside No. 18, by the start of Balta köz, in 1975.

Balta köz (‘Axe Alley’ in English), which lies between Nos. 19 and 17 Tárnok utca, is a street with medieval vaults whose existence was recorded as early as 1425. Its German name, Zum Hackl, derives from that of an inn that used to stand here. The walls of the narrow and Romantically dark lane are fabled to have seen the soldiers of Ladislas V capture the young Hunyadi brothers Ladislas and Matthias, whose men turned on the attackers with their weapons—their axes.

The courtyard balcony of the building at No. 4 is in Gothic style, and what is more, through the decorative wrought iron grill on its gate, an ornamental well, grown over with ivy, can be glimpsed. The well was created from Gothic and Renaissance fragments by the famous Alajos Stróbl who designed the equestrian statue of St. Stephen and many other monuments in Budapest.

Walking down Balta köz, we reach űri utca, along which Dísz tér to the south can be approached.

Minister and novelist József Eötvös (1813-70) was born at No. 19. Constructed in the late 15th century

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