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

sculptures of the Artists’ Promenade, we glimpse the 1931 reconstruction of what was the Premonstratensians twelfth-century St. Michael’s Church. In the 1920s, Kálmán Lux unearthed and identified the provostal church of the Premonstratensian order. To this day, masses are celebrated regularly in the chapel, rebuilt in Romanesque style.

As we continue our walk, we should not forget to look at the giant plane tree north of the ruins near the pathway. The oldest tree on the island, this plane is a veritable forest in itself.

To the south of the chapel are the large gardens, church, cloister, farm buildings and courtyards of the Dominican nuns. The remains of this complex are not entirely uncovered yet, even though digs of one kind or another have been carried out for more than 150 years here, and professional excavations have also been conducted for almost a hundred years.

The history of the first, incompetent, digs is well known: after the great flood of 1838, Palatine Joseph ordered his gardeners to level off the soil destroyed by the icy deluge and to fill in the hollows left by the water. The labourers began to remove the earth from the fairly high walls of the Church of the Blessed Virgin, which resulted in the discovery of one of the church’s foundation walls, the brick floor of the sanctuary, a few tombs including a marble coffin containing a ring, some gilded fabric, a number of gold coins and a golden funeral crown embellished with precious stones. As it turned out, it was not Princess Margaret's tomb which was discovered (the contents of that had been taken by the nuns escaping from the Turks in the fourteenth century and the relics were subsequently lost), but the crypt of Stephen V who had also been buried here. The valuable grave furnishings, with the exception of the crown which is kept in the Budapest History Museum, have been scattered and lost; the unprofessionally carried out excavation caused irreparable damage. Posterity did benefit, however, since from that time archaeologists knew where they had to look for the remains of the cloister.

Mention should be made here of the curious fact that

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