Gábor Eszter: Andrássy Avenue – Our Budapest (Budapest, 2002)
French style. his pink cheeks. and the obligatory home-cap on hi& pate, he was one of the leaden of the whole company, a tribal chief of this realm made up of all sorts of colourful individuals. The other chief or uncrowned king of this bohemian monarchy was the more aristocratic Pál Szinyei Merse. [...] What was it that generated the charm of the artists' table? Well, the complete absence of self-importance! The fact that Szinyei was called Uncle Pali even by the youngest and Lechner was addressed as Pops Just like his prematurely deceased son. the painter Dönci Lechner, had called him. The nickname caught on. because it could catch on. with the whole company." The regular members of the artists' table included Károly Ferenczy, Adolf Fényes, József Rippl-Rónai, István Csók, Károly Kernstok, Zsigmond Kisfalud! Strobl, Elek Falus, Tibor Pólya and many others. The writer Ernő Szép, who also liked going to the café, recalled in 1931: ’We had a café on Andrássy út in those finer days: the Japán Café with its walls covered with majolica tiles painted over with bamboos, chrysanthemums, vases and dream-like birds. The café is still open, but the period itself is closed. We, who went to the Japán, are likely to have traversed a greater distance than we would have done if we’d gone to Japan itself: the café was a more distantly exotic place than the world of white lotus, green tea and the golden Buddha, because the Japán was the fairy land of youth. That was where I went in the afternoons, ignoring novels, horse-races, and even love sometimes: such a sacred need of life that was in the time of amicable fraternisation." Although the artists’ table was there no more, the café remained open in the interwar period. Writers were allowed to sit by an 'improved' cup of coffee for hours undisturbed. (The 'improvement' consisted of an extra dash of milk or sugar and then another helping of coffee served by the waiter.) It was here that poet Attila József played his memorable games of chess with writer Lajos Nagy. And, if rumours are to be credited, it was "at the coffee-house corner" here that the former wrote his famous poem On My Birthday. In the early fifties an impressive outlet of the State Booksellers Company operated here, and later the Hungarian Writers Bookshop was opened on the premises of the former Japán. Today's Writers Bookshop offers an attractive combination of the two earlier functions with its reading tables by the corner windows where coffee and tea are served in a reader-friendly atmosphere. In 1935 a statue of Ödön Lechner was erected in a spot of Liszt Ferenc tér clearly visible from the café-window. "Where have you gone, Pops?" wailed Ernő Szép when the statue was removed to the front garden of the Museum of Applied Arts in 1948. 28
