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Down
Town of Pest
Vigadó
This single word is the full name of this romantic
concert hall and ballroom.
It means something like 'merrymaking', a place
for entertainments.
It was intended as a concert hall and a ballroom
and took seven years to build, beginning in
1858.
It took so long partly because the builders
needed several attempts to cope with the unusual
task.
When the building was finished in 1865, it was
received with unanimous obtuseness.
Some found it to be too unusual, some others
to be too Hungarian.
In its present form, rebuilt after war, it was
re-opened in the winter of 1980.
Statue of Sándor Petôfi
The statue is a bit far from the taste of our
times.
It shows the poet at the age of 25, reciting
his most famous patriotic poem, beginning "Talpra,
magyar!" (Rise Hungarians!).
Petôfi (1823-49) started as a poor student
and strolling player and soon became the most
popular poet of his time, also praised by literary
circles.
A genius, he was a master of poetic form.
He introduced the vernacular into Hungarian
verse, acquiring inevitably the title of the
Robert Burns of Hungary.
His short life was the full life of a man whose
love was returned, who had taken part in a victorious
revolution and who had become a soldier to fight
for his country.
He was killed in one of the last battles of
the Hungarian War of Independence.
After his death the rumour that he was still
alive circulated round the country for years
and years.
Most recently, the rumour was acted upon by
a self-mad millionaire, who sent a team to Siberia
to dig up a grave.
The corps they happened to unearth later proved
to be that of a young lady.
He is the first poet Hungarian children study
in detail at school.
There are lots of other things named after him:
a museum, a bridge, an army camp, a radio channel,
to mention just a few.
Hungarian Academy of Sciences
This institution, together with so many others,
was founded in the second quarter of the last
century, what is called Reform-Age.
On the wall facing Akadémia utca the
large relief immortalizes the moment when Count
Széchenyi, in 1825, offered his whole
yearly income for the foundation of the Academy.
This was the first neo-Renaissance building
in the city and was built between 1862 and 1864,
to the plans of Friedrich Stüler, an architect
from Berlin.
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