Prohászka László: Equestrian Statues - Our Budapest (Budapest, 1997)
CVM DEO PRO PATRIA ET LIBERTATE “With God for the fatherland and liberty.” On the back of the base the following can be read: Raised by the nation on the second centenary of his death 1935 (the date refers to the anniversary and not the actual date of the inauguration). When, after World War II, the scars left by the siege of Budapest were being healed, the external covering of the statue was also renewed. But in the early fifties the words Cum Deo were not carved back into the cover as they referred to God. Almost four decades would have to pass before - partly by public demand expressed in readers’ letters published in the press - the missing two words were put back on the base in 1989. The Rákóczi statue not only fits organically into its environment, the monument itself has the power to shape the space around it. This is a feature shared only by the very finest public monuments. The square outside the building of parliament is now unthinkable without it. János Pásztor held the firm conviction that no enduring monument can be made, unless there is an inner spiritual force to supplement the effect of well-proportioned masses and contours. The equestrian statue of Ferenc Rákóczi II matches these high artistic expectations. That is why it is so natural that many regard it as one of the finest specimens of Budapest’s public statuary. Aside from the correction of some minor wartime damage, the piece stands in its original form in a spot where it always has been. Its cast-bronze scale model is held in the Budapest History Museum. The Rákóczi statue is not the last in the row of monuments unveiled in 1937, since on 17 October of the same year, the monument to the Mounted Artillery was inaugurated with military pomp in Palota tér (today’s Dózsa György tér, I. District). Not only particular regiments were honoured with the erection of monuments in Budapest, but the fallen heroes of entire services as well, such as the navy, the mountain riflemen, the mechanised troops or the army surgeons corps. This piece by Miklós Ligeti belonged with these. The nineteen-metre long monument, carved in Haraszt limestone, had a foreground, in which six military 42
