Lukács Baths: Thank-You Notes in Marble

Why is it significant?

Step through the gate on Frankel Leó út into the courtyard, and before you smell the sulphur, read the walls. They are covered with small marble plaques in Hungarian, German, English, Italian and more.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Step through the gate on Frankel Leó út into the courtyard, and before you smell the sulphur, read the walls. They are covered with small marble plaques in Hungarian, German, English, Italian and more. Each one is a thank-you note, carved in stone by someone who came here in pain and left, they believed, healed.

This corner of Buda has been about hot water for a very long time. The medieval village here was called Felhévíz, Upper Hot Water, and in the Middle Ages the Knights of Saint John kept a hospice by the springs. The Ottomans built baths and mills along the warm streams, and the pond next to the spa is still called Malom-tó, the Mill Lake.

What you cannot see is what lies underneath. Beneath the mill pond opens a cave system flooded with warm spring water, named after the nineteenth-century scientist János Molnár, who studied these springs. Divers have mapped kilometres of passages under the streets of Rózsadomb, and they swim in water that is warm all year round, in the dark, under the traffic.

Above ground, the Lukács has long been known as the bath of the intellectuals. Through the socialist decades, writers, artists, doctors and professors came for the pools and stayed for the talk, and some regulars still treat it less like a spa than like a club with very warm water. The present buildings date mainly from the 1890s and later, and they have a gently faded grandeur that suits the conversation.

So linger by those plaques for a moment. Some are a century old, written by people whose names are forgotten, but their gratitude is still on the wall. Then carry on north along Frankel Leó út for a few minutes. Watch the house numbers, because the last stop of this walk is hidden inside an ordinary apartment block.