Ferkai András: Shopfronts - Our Budapest (Budapest, 1996)

Ages, when a door or a window would connect the shop to the street. This is indicated by the Hungarian word for shop -bolt. This is a cognate of boltív meaning “arch" and £>o/íhajtás meaning “vault” (and of the English word bolt as in bolt of lightening - trans.). In Buda it was not'unusual for one half of the round arched aperture to serve as a door, while the other half was used as a shop window. For the night both would be covered with a wooden panel that could be unhinged (or, later, pushed back and wedged open) during the day. The Arany Sas Pharmacy Museum in 18 Tárnok utca is a reconstructed example of such old doorways in the Castle District in Buda. At that time merchants had either wrought-iron signs or signs painted on the wall to let people know what was available behind the otherwise similar doorways. Several of these signs and symbols are still in use, such as the pharmacies’ snake representing Aesculapius, the metal plate of barbers and the tobacco leaf of tobacconists.

The Baroque period and later that of neo-Classicism brought no changes except that the doorways started to follow the pattern of the apertures above them and that for the night they were covered with wooden panels swinging on beautiful wrought-iron strap-hinges or with sheet-iron shutters. The row of wooden panels found on the ground floor of some neo-Classical tenements in Budapest can be traced back to this period (e.g. 10 Bérezi István utca, 12 Kálmán Imre utca, 6 Sas utca and 16 Vámház körút, all of

Doorway with wooden panels at 16 Vámház körút, V

6