Pilvax köz: The Café Where 1848 Began
Why is it significant?
You are in a narrow passage between tall houses, the kind of lane most people hurry through on the way somewhere else. Slow down and look for the memorial plaques. On this spot stood a coffee house that changed the history of Hungary.
Key Facts
| Place | Pilvax köz: The Café Where 1848 Began |
|---|---|
| Address | Pilvax köz, 1052 Budapest, Hungary |
| Geo Coordinates | 47.49450, 19.05500 |
| Part of Walk | Coffee, Cake & Paprika: A Budapest Food Walk from Gerbeaud to the Great Market Hall |
| Generated | Generated |
You are in a narrow passage between tall houses, the kind of lane most people hurry through on the way somewhere else. Slow down and look for the memorial plaques. On this spot stood a coffee house that changed the history of Hungary.
It was called the Café Pilvax, after one of its owners, and in the 1840s it was the favourite haunt of Pest's young radicals: poets, law students, journalists, hot-headed and mostly broke. They had a table of their own, which they nicknamed the table of public opinion. Among them sat the poet Sándor Petőfi, the novelist Mór Jókai and the fiery young Pál Vasvári.
On the morning of 15 March 1848, news of revolution in Vienna had reached Pest. The young men met at the Pilvax, and Petőfi read his new poem, the National Song, with its refrain swearing that Hungarians would be slaves no longer. Then they set off through the rain, gathering students on the way, to a printing house where they printed that poem and a list of twelve demands without asking the censor's permission. By the end of the day Pest had a free press and a revolution.
Think about what a coffee house offered them. Warmth, cheap coffee, newspapers from Vienna and Paris, a table you could keep all day, and no one asking you to leave. In a city with no free parliament and no free press, the café was the place where public opinion was actually made. That is why every Hungarian schoolchild knows the name of this one.
The original building was demolished in the early twentieth century, and nothing of the old café survives except its name and its legend. Walk back out to Petőfi Sándor utca, named of course after the young poet, and head towards Ferenciek tere, where a strange, glittering palace with oriental arches fills one corner.