Budapest Palace Quarter

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24 March - Palace Quarter - Budapest. #heygo http://www.heygo.com

Adam our guide was a bit late arriving, he made us smile saying he had been bombed by a pigeon and had to clean himself up.

With many beautiful buildings in Budapest, this trip was around the old Palace District which forms an inner part of Pest. Known until the communist period as the ‘Magnates’ Quarter’.



The two-metre great flood of 1838 caused the collapse of 900 buildings with only 250 surviving. The few buildings in the Palotanegyed which survive from before 1838 include the Chapel of St Roch - the patron saint of plague sufferers built in 1711 in the hope of warding off the plague then devastating Pest, on the site of an early Christian, possibly 4th century, chapel.

The oldest known building in the Palace District, was rebuilt in 1945 after being destroyed in World War II - and then was damaged badly again in 1956.



The Palace District is also notable for one of Budapest’s two surviving buildings designed by famous Viennese architects, the István Károlyi or Károlyi-Csekonics palace at Múzeum utca 17.

Most of the Palotanegyed’s architecture echoes that of the Viennese Franz-Joseph era from the 1840s until World War One.

A well-known Hungarian-Jewish architectural team also designed Hungary’s first department store, the Corvin Áruház.The architect was Zoltán Reiss (1877-1945), who designed many buildings in Budapest and elsewhere in Hungary during the first decades of the twentieth century, and who also served as an officer in the Austro-Hungarian army in the First World War.

Construction of the classicist building began in 1915, with the department store finally opening in 1926 (five years later it incorporated Hungary’s first escalator). It was owned by M.J. Emden and Sons, Hamburg.



One of the oldest gardens in Budapest is the Karoly gardens. A pretty garden even in March.

Charlie rabbit by Géza Dezső Fekete (2016 bronze statue),the Belgian giant rabbit had probably been an Easter bunny left in the Károlyi Garden to his fate. Though he was not noble by blood his adoption to the garden made him to a aristoc rabbit with all the usual priviligies. He was the biggest animal allowed to enter the otherwise strictly guarded and trimmed park. He lived there for six years in his cage which he only left for a couple of hours for a constutitonal walk in fresh air and some frisking around during the morning and evening hours undisturbed by commoners.



The reflections of the buildings were mirrors on the outside of an underground car park, a great idea to enhance the ancient buildings but keeping a modern facility.

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