Buza Péter - Gadányi György: Towering Aspirations - Our Budapest (Budapest, 1998)
124 Andrássy út, district VI When Sándor Fellner, the fashionable architect of Histori- cism, prepared the designs in 1883 for a villa on Andrássy út, Mrs Gyula Bulyovszky née Lilla Szilágyi was already a widow. Her husband, a successful playwright and critic and a by-then forgotten but at the time prominent participant in the legendary days of the 1848 March revolution, had died in the same year. The actress herself had retired from the stage almost a decade before. The daughter of “whistling” Pál Szilágyi, a noted comedian in one of the first Hungarian companies, she had a wonderful theatrical career behind her, which had begun in the National Theatre of Pest to reach its zenith on the stages of Hamburg, Dresden, Weimar, Gotha, Riga and Amsterdam. Yet her writing career was not over. By 1883 she had translated innumerable plays and published a series of sketches and travel notes in the Budapest papers. Her volume of short stories and her diary could be found on every fashionable lady's bedside table in Pest. The turreted villa over the Körönd is a palatial building, like the other stately buildings lining the broad avenue leading all the way to the City Park. These had been erected, or were being constructed, in the seventies and eighties and in a few years the entire row of glamorous villas was in place. It was one of the most exclusive, if not the most exclusive, residential area of Pest. Lilla Szilágyi took up residence sometimes here, sometimes in her resort house in Gmunden on Lake Traun outside the Austrian city of Salzburg. On 29 January 1888 the caretaker fired his revolver at her, severely wounding her. Although officially undiscovered, the motive can probably be guessed at, the victim still being a celebrated beauty. A hurriedly drawn up will made provisions for the many-spired villa, too, stipulating that for two years after her death the revenue generated by the property, valued at 1.5 million koronás, be paid to her son Aladár Bulyovszky and then, after the sale of the house, a fund be established to support the orphanage of Kolozsvár (Lilia’s native town). As for the actual fate of the villa on Andrássy út, nothing happened in accordance with the will. Lilla Szilágyi recovered and, in 1903, to ease the strains on her financial position, sold the house herself to her neighbour, the iron wholesaler Frankl Gottlieb. By that time the aristocrats of birth and talent had all disappeared from the villas in the neighbourhood, leaving their proud spires behind to proclaim the ascendancy of the third class. 8
