Streets squares and districts to visit Budapest

In the Middle Ages, the Vienna Gate was known as the "Saturday market", i.e. the market for non-Jewish merchants. Its current form dates back to 1936, and symbolically links the castle to the city of Buda. Once through the gate, the eye is immediately drawn to the palace of the National Archives, a building with decorated ceramic tiles by Zsolnay and a historicist style as intended by its architect Samu Pecz, who also designed the Grand Market.

A shopping mall, a subway station with dizzying escalators, a streetcar hub, the former Moscow Square, which has undergone a long urban rehabilitation, is functional again, its architecture has become neutral, worthy of a modal node of public transport without asperity. The renominational madness of István Tarlós, conservative mayor of Budapest from 2010 to 2019, has taken over Moszkva tér to give it back its pre-communist name.

Now that it has been cleared of its fences linked to the work on the automatic metro (line 4), Place Kálvin is more than ever the epicentre of student and festive Budapest. It owes its name to Pastor Calvin, and this is where the city's two eastern gates, destroyed in 1796, were located. Hotel Mercure Korona hides the remains of one of them. To the west of the square stands the Calvinist temple of Budapest (Budapesti Kálvin Református Templom).

The square is named after a great Hungarian actress of the ^19th century nicknamed the "National Nightingale". It is the nerve center of the city and has benefited from major works until 2022 to give it back its letters of nobility. One of the most prestigious theaters of Budapest was located on this square. It was unfortunately destroyed in the 1960s; a stele pays tribute to it. It is also a metro stop ideally located at the intersection of lines 2, 4 and 6.

At the end of Sütő Street, on Szervita Square, one of Budapest's most beautiful Art Nouveau buildings can be seen, the Török Bank, which refers to its sponsor, a bank owner named Török. Built in 1906, the building has large windows enclosed in a metal formation. It is decorated with a magnificent mosaic of Miksa Róth. The child prodigy of the Hungarian Secession reproduced the Virgin, which he surrounded with tutelary figures of local history, such as Count Széchenyi, Lájos Kossuth or Ferenc Rákoczi.

In response to the sudden development of Budapest and the ensuing housing crisis at the beginning of the ^20thcentury, the prime minister of the time, Sándor Wekerle, decided to build this beautiful, off-center Transylvanian-style garden city on the outskirts of Pest (now Kispest). The architect Károly Kós, a native of Transylvania, was commissioned to design it, and decided to emphasize the sense of community and closeness to the environment.