Meskó Csaba: Thermal Baths - Our Budapest (Budapest, 1999)

steam chambers, or a refreshing or medical massage. There is also access from here to the open-air swimming pools. There are two such pools outside, each at a different temperature, a sauna and a sunbathing terrace.

Special mention must be made of the mud and traction baths, complete with a mud pond. At the tub bath department underwater massage and carbonic bath treatment are available on doctor’s orders. The Lukács Baths houses Budapest's oldest Comprehensive Physiotherapy Department (day hospital), established in 1979.

The drinking well of the Lukács was ceremonially inaugurated in 1937 on the occasion of the First International Congress of Balneology.

Opposite the Lukács Baths, by the mill pond, there was the ‘Turkish Baths”, which operated as a public bath until 1965. The poet Zoltán Jékely, who lived in the neighbourhood, writes about this establishment in his poem “To the Bath of Gul Baba”:

Do you know that quaintly squatting little dome whose coloured windows change the inner monochrome of puffing steamy clouds that fill the air inhaled by naked men reclining in this humid lair?

From the depth of mother nature’s red-hot womb breaks up forever this deluge of scalding fume to feed man’s childish faith that naught will ever cease On earth that once our pains began to ease

The pools which Turkish princes used to seat today the beggar Frarizl’s grimy buttocks heat the oldest rogue that ever begged in Óbuda is now the reborn likeness of the late Pasha.

This bath was demolished in 1970 with only its cupola left intact, which, however, is not of Turkish origin.

The waters of the Lukács Baths contain sodium alongside its calcium-magnesium-hydro-carbonic and sulphate components as well as a significant amount of ionised fluoride. It is recommended for degenerative ailments of the joints, chronic and semi-acute arthritis, deformation of the spine, protruded intervertebral discs, neuralgia, calcium deficiency of the bones and for follow-up care after accidents. Drinking cures based on these waters are indicated for chronic catarrhal ailments of the stomach, the gastric tract, the bilial ducts and the respiratory system.

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