Gál Éva: Margaret Island - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2000)

on the Habsburg archdukes retained their hold on the island for more than a hundred years: on the death of Joseph in 1847, ownership was transferred to his eldest son Stephen, who in his turn left the island to Archduke Joseph Charles Louis, the youngest of Stephen’s sons born of his third marriage, from whom the property was inherited by his son Archduke Joseph Augustine in 1905. It was then from Palatine Joseph’s grandson that the Hungarian state purchased, via the Board of Public Works and in accordance with Act XLVIII of 1908, Margaret Island for the general public. The price paid for the island was 11 million korona, a sum regarded as astronomical at the time. Margaret Island first came under the jurisdiction of District III, then District XIII of Budapest, where it still officially belongs.

Meanwhile some major changes occurred in terms of the use and, indeed the whole life of the island, still owned by the archduke. From 1870, the island was developed, on the basis of its recently discovered medicinal springs, into a “global bathing centre” complete with hotels, restaurants and medicinal baths. At the end of the nineteenth century, but mainly from the 1920s, Margaret Island had become a popular venue of sports activities—rowing, tennis, swimming, and polo. Between the two world wars, fashionable entertainment facilities also appeared on the island and, with the opening of an open-air theatre, Thalia, too, set up shop here. However, until 1945 admission fees were charged to insure that only a “select few” should frequent the island.

During World War II the architecture and vegetation of Margaret Island sustained serious damage. Virtually no building on the island survived the siege of Budapest and many of its centuries-old trees also perished. After the liberation of Budapest, when no bridge stood between Buda and Pest (the encircled German troops blew them all up at the last minute) a temporary pontoon bridge, affectionately called Manci (Madge) Bridge by the public, was built across Margaret Island to connect the two banks of the Danube.

In the reconstruction following the war, some of the old buildings were repaired, while others were demol11