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

cessors of the Dominican nuns, the Clarissas, who had moved back from Pozsony to Buda, tended to lease the property to Óbuda residents, who mostly used the area as a hay field. The ruins of medieval buildings were in all likelihood used as quarries: when construction work was given a new boost in the eighteenth century, the population of surrounding areas helped themselves to the still useable and easily available stone they found here, as in medieval ruins elsewhere, to use it for the reconstruction of what the wars had destroyed.

The counties of Pest, Pilis and Solt reported the following to the governor-general’s council in Pozsony in 1727: The Island of Hares is currently owned by the Buda order of Clarissas, but it is wholly deserted, and is hardly at all habitable; it lies at a length of 918 fathoms [a Hungarian fathom equalled 1.896 metres], with a breadth of 148 at the middle and no more than 37 fathoms at its tips. In six places the ruins of various buildings are in evidence. Two of these seem to have been churches; the walls of one are still standing, while the other is recognisable from its remnants. Three ruinous edifices are surrounded by a sizeable quadrangular garden-wall; these must have been gardens and in the middle of one is a destroyed well.

What exactly these ruins could have been is not to be determined by the wall-ruins. Neither can it be established who the residents of this island were.

The nuns built a small chapel by the ruins of the Franciscan church in 1739, which they consecrated with the permission of the Archbishop of Esztergom. One mass a month is likely to have been celebrated here. In the 1840s, the Palatine’s head gardener in charge of Margaret Island remembered seeing, at the beginning of the century, a small chapel standing near the Franciscan ruins. The altarpiece with the Virgin Mary in the chapel was sought out by “people coming in processions for a long time”. When exactly the building disappeared is not known, but it might have been washed away by the flood of 1838.

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