Vigadó, the Danube Promenade and the Little Princess
Why is it significant?
Stop on Vigadó tér with your back to the river. In front of you is a facade like nothing else on the Danube: round arches, slender columns, carved faces and folk patterns, as if Venice, a Moorish palace and a Hungarian village had agreed on one building.
Key Facts
| Place | Vigadó, the Danube Promenade and the Little Princess |
|---|---|
| Address | Vigadó tér 2, 1051 Budapest, Hungary |
| Geo Coordinates | 47.49600, 19.04960 |
| Part of Walk | Crown, Dome and River: Budapest's Parliament, St Stephen's Basilica & the Danube Bank |
| Generated | Generated |
Stop on Vigadó tér with your back to the river. In front of you is a facade like nothing else on the Danube: round arches, slender columns, carved faces and folk patterns, as if Venice, a Moorish palace and a Hungarian village had agreed on one building. Behind you, on the railing of the tram line, sits a small bronze girl in a crown.
This is the Pesti Vigadó, a concert and ballroom hall designed by Frigyes Feszl and opened in 1865. An older hall on this spot, the Redoute, had been wrecked in 1849 by Austrian cannon fire from Buda during the war of independence. Feszl's answer was a building that tried to speak Hungarian in stone, at a time when Vienna decided almost everything.
The music made here was serious. Franz Liszt played and conducted in these halls. In November 1889 a young conductor then running the Royal Hungarian Opera, Gustav Mahler, premiered his First Symphony here... and the audience was baffled. Badly damaged in the Second World War, the Vigadó reopened in 1980 and again, fully restored, in 2014.
Now turn round to the Little Princess. She is the work of the sculptor László Marton, a child playing at royalty with a crown on her head and a cloak around her shoulders, and the story goes that his daughter inspired her. She has sat on this railing since around 1990, swinging her legs above the yellow trams. Behind her runs the Dunakorzó, where before the war grand hotels lined the river and the whole city came to stroll on summer evenings. Almost all of those hotels were destroyed in 1944 and 1945.
Look across the water to the Castle Hill and then back upstream, towards the Parliament where you started. In 1987 these Danube banks were declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and you have just walked through their story: a crown, a revolution, a riverbank of empty shoes, a square of quarrelling memories, and a city that kept building beautiful things anyway. The walk ends here, on the promenade... take a seat by the Little Princess and watch the river.