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

An “imported" Roman stone among

THE RUINS OF THE CHURCH

there must have been many to whom the whereabouts of the monastery’s ruins was already known 50-60 years before the flood of 1838, after which the “discovery” was made. On eighteenth-century maps (on two reliable charts made in 1752 and around 1790 respectively) there are markings, in the form of inscriptions and, partly, floor-plans, to show the location of medieval ruins. Not only the cloister’s ruins but those of the Franciscan church were marked in such a way, as well as those belonging to the Knights Hospitalers and, at the northern tip, the remains of the castle once owned by the Archbishop of Esztergom. It is a mystery of history and psychology how this knowledge could have been forgotten in a matter of decades. Perhaps those using the medieval ruins as stone quarries might have been

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