Hajós György: Heroes' Square - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2001)

way his right had rests upon his mace make his preeminence among the chieftains unmistakable, the identical height of the sculptures suggests the fact that the leaders pledged, in a blood treaty, mutual loyalty and responsibility in the cause of settling their nation down in the Carpathian basin. The statues were damaged during World War II, and their restoration was only undertaken in 1994-95.

Of the four figures standing on the attic wall of the colonnade the first to be completed was the 4.50-metre tall allegory of War, which was finished in 1906. A naked male figure standing up in a biga drives, with a snake used as a whip, his frenzied stallions sent into full gallop by the imaginary din of battle. “This is the most powerfully shaped of all the sculptural compositions,” wrote the renowned art historian Károly Lyka. (The sculpture met with great popular success while it was on display before being set up, and in 1909 it was awarded the Association Prize of the Exhibition Hall.)

Opposite the statue of War, on the other section of the colonnade, stands the allegory of Peace set up two years later. On a cart pulled by two placid horses stirring forward in easy canter stands a tall, female figure holding aloft a palm leaf of peace, expressing as it does tranquillity, meekness, the placidity of a bourgeois society—the antithesis of the senseless savagery of war.

The group of the chieftains

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