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

and exotic flowers bloomed in all the colours of the spectrum. Beyond this flower bed was a reception hall from where a seven-metre wide covered esplanade led to the restaurant and the café on the lower island; the walkway ended in a 21 metre long covered hall. Intended to enhance a general sense of well-being, these edifices were to protect the visitor from the rain. Behind the hall stood the restaurant designed by Ybl, with its spacious roofless and covered terraces. Called Casino from the 1930s, this establishment has undergone so much restructuring in the course of the decades that by now there is almost nothing that reminds of the original building. To the right of the restaurant stood a curious-looking edifice from the early 1900s—the two-storey, semi-timber building of a café, constructed in the so-called Swiss style. The building, which had originally served as the hunters’ pavilion during the millennial exhibition, had been erected to orders by Archduke Joseph. Its terraces afforded a splendid view of both the Buda and the Pest sides of the Danube.

Virtually nothing of all this survives today. In the middle of the circular flower bed there is now a centenary monument set up in 1972 to commemorate Budapest’s unification. The fountain behind the monument was established in 1962; when it works, it is illuminated with colour lights for which reason it is called the polychrome fountain.

The wooden covered esplanade and the café were pulled down in the 1920s; although the building of the Casino still exists, in its present condition it can hardly be the pride of the island. The overall impression is, however, improved by the plants standing here to give a kind of foretaste of the park: the right of the driveway leading off the bridge is flanked by specimens of the tree called Celtis, together with black pines, while the grove between the circular flower bed and the Casino features a weeping willow, horse-chestnut trees, robinias, a centuries- old honeylocust, and plane-trees.

We might as well begin our walk along the roadway starting on the left, that is by the western bank of the island. It was along the route of this that once ran the track of the horse-tram, opened in 1868. In 1928 the sin32