Gábor Eszter: Andrássy Avenue – Our Budapest (Budapest, 2002)

■ The

Baboaay Villa — 1905-1923 (No. 129 Andráay

út)

straightened out and the ceramic ornaments he had broken off. What resulted was a coolly elegant, classic mansion — a perfect embassy building. It has been occupied by the Yugoslav Embassy since the 1930s. It was here that Imre Nagy and his followers sought shelter on 4 November 1956, and it was from here that he was carried off to Romania.

And that is where Andrássy

út reaches

its end. If so much has been said about the changes that have occurred in time, it should also be noted that rather than come up against the present wilderness of stone called a square, the avenue originally flowed into the City Park. In the axis of the street on the edge of the park there stood, from 1884, a gloriette (by Miklós

Ybl) that

served as the basis of a flag-pole. The structure was too slender to give the avenue an emphatic closure, which is why the demand for a more monumental ending arose. Thus the gloriette was replaced, somewhat further into the Park, with the Millenary Monument. At the time all this was in the midst of parkland, even though not the thickest part of it but in a landscaped grassy square of trees and flowers. The Palace of Arts and the Museum of Fine Arts, too, were built in a grove, among trees. On the occasion of the Eucharistic Congress of 1938, in order to create sufficient room for the crowd attending the mass celebrated by Archbishop Pacelli (the later Pope Pius XII), the vegetation of the square was uprooted and the space between the

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