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

early as 1795, it was only by the 1840s that the City Park had become a destination popular not only with the lower classes seeking simple diversion. After the Austro- Hungarian Compromise of 1867 life quickened in earnest. At that time some elegant restaurants were also built, including Wampetics, which was operated from 1870 onwards and Gundel which was opened at the time of the Millenary celebrations. Behind the bridge stood the Royal Capital Pavilion, Weingruber’s restaurant, whose interior rooms had a seating capacity of 2,500.

The celebrities of the country’s literary and artistic life became regular patrons, forming permanent table societies. (Innumerable poems were to be written about the park, which was also the setting of several prose narratives and theatrical plays, including Liliom by Ferenc Molnár.)

At the time the City Park was accessible by way of the crowded and uncomfortable König Gasse (later Király utca) and what is now Városligeti fasor, or City Park Avenue. A nicer and cleaner roadway was required, one that could be integrated with the capital’s new radial system of avenues. The construction of Sugár út (today’s Andrássy út) was begun as early as 1870 and the paving had been finished by St. Stephen’s Day 1876, by which time only a smaller proportion of the buildings flanking the street had been erected. The inauguration of the new thoroughfare, together with that of the underground railway line opened to mark the Millenary celebrations—the latter providing an alternative to the horse-tram system as a means of moving larger crowds—meant the relocation of the “gate” of the City Park to the area of Heroes’ Square.

On what is the square today, but on a spot that still belonged to the City Park at the time, Vilmos Zsigmondy, an eminent mining engineer and pioneer of geothermal explorations in Hungary, began the drilling of an artesian well in 1868. On 21 January 1878, after ten years’ hard work, he reached a depth of 971 metres, from where 831 litres of water wells up every minute at a temperature of 74 degrees Celsius. (The only drilling operation to surpass the one carried out by Zsigmondy’s was the one exploring layers of salt in Sperenberg which reached a depth of 1,271 metres.) The well, which is the deepest of all known sources of artesian water,

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