Zeidler Miklós: Sporting Spaces - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2000)

The People’s Stadium and environs

The Millenary Sports Ground

(No. 3 Szabó József utca, district XIV)

The Millenary is the oldest of Budapest’s still operational sports centres. Squatting modestly in the shadow of its younger but larger brothers, the People’s Stadium, the Sports Hall and the Kisstadion, or Small Stadium, the “Mili” can hardly be noticed from the neighbouring streets.

The “Csömöri Street Racing Course of the National Sports Committee” (as the complex between the old horse racing course and Stefánia út was officially called) was built in the spring of 1896 to plans by electrical engineer Ottó Titusz Bláthy. The facility, meant to be the venue of the open-air sports events of the Millenary Celebrations was opened on 14 May 1896. The ceremony included sports events, and it was then that the public had its first opportunity to welcome back the country’s Olympic competitors freshly returned from Athens. The millenary gymnastics competition held three weeks later attracted the attention of King Francis Joseph and his entourage who watched the event from a magnificent, terraced royal pavilion.

When the year of the anniversary was over, the edifice was to have been be pulled down, but it being the

Francis Joseph on the grandstand (June 1896)

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