Pongrácz Erzsébet: The Cinemas of Budapest - Our Budapest (Budapest, 1998)

SZINDBÁD (1911)

7 6 Szent István körút, district XIII

It is as if this cinema bearing the name of Sindbad the time traveller was itself looking into the past for its own beginnings, its own origins. Those origins, however, were quite some time ago, since when Izsó Rózsa realised his vision of a cinema in 1911, there were only empty lots in this Lipótváros neighbourhood. It was at that time that the buildings of the Lipót körút were erected and vagabonds and unemployed lingered around among the shacks and silos on the huge, empty lots behind them. The tenants of the apartment buildings lining the körút, the increasingly prosperous citizenry of Lipótváros, welcomed the new “Elite” cinema with enthusiasm, not being bothered by the appearance of the workers employed locally in the fine little picture house. The cinema, which had a capacity of 300 at the time (later reconstruction reduced the seating to 160), was given the name Mesevár (Fairy Tale Castle) in the forties and was renamed again after nationalisation as Tanács (Council) Cinema, where for years the programme consisted of one film playing all day long. Later the cinema was given another “talking” name with the addition of “the Cinema of Hungarian Films” prefixed to Tanács, indicating that both new and older, re-run Hungarian films could be seen there.

Within the ART Chain this cinema has specialised in art

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