Margaret Bridge: The Bridge That Bends
Why is it significant?
Stand at the Buda end of Margaret Bridge, with the trams clattering past, and look along the deck towards Pest. Something is odd about it. The bridge does not run straight across the Danube... halfway over, it bends.
Key Facts
| Place | Margaret Bridge: The Bridge That Bends |
|---|---|
| Address | Margit híd, budai hídfő, 1027 Budapest, Hungary |
| Geo Coordinates | 47.51490, 19.03930 |
| Part of Walk | Water Town Secrets: Budapest's Víziváros from Batthyány tér to Gül Baba's Rose Garden |
| Generated | Generated |
Stand at the Buda end of Margaret Bridge, with the trams clattering past, and look along the deck towards Pest. Something is odd about it. The bridge does not run straight across the Danube... halfway over, it bends.
Margaret Bridge was the second permanent bridge in the city, after the Chain Bridge, and it was built between 1872 and 1876 by a French company, the firm of Ernest Goüin. The Danube here splits around Margaret Island, and the engineers wanted each half of the bridge to meet its branch of the river at a right angle, square to the current. So the two halves meet at the tip of the island at an angle, and the whole bridge kinks by about thirty degrees. A short spur down onto the island itself was added in 1900.
On 4 November 1944, as the Soviet army approached, German military engineers had already wired the bridge with explosives. In broad daylight, with the bridge crowded, the charges on the Pest span went off by accident. Trams full of passengers, cars and pedestrians fell into the river. Hundreds of people were killed. In January 1945 the retreating Germans blew up every remaining Danube bridge in the city. Margaret Bridge was rebuilt and reopened in 1948.
The island it leads to carries a gentler story. It is named after Saint Margaret, daughter of King Béla the Fourth. After the Mongol invasion of 1241 and 1242, the king vowed that if Hungary survived, he would give his unborn daughter to God, and Margaret grew up and died in a Dominican convent on the island, whose ruins still stand among the plane trees.
Now turn your back on the river. Cross the busy road carefully, find the foot of Gül Baba utca, and start to climb. It is one of the steepest and prettiest cobbled lanes in Budapest, and at the top, among roses, waits a tomb that is a place of pilgrimage for Muslims from all over the world.