The Chain Bridge

For most of its history the Danube divided the hill town of Buda from the flat town of Pest. A bridge of boats was used for much of the year, and in winter the ice made crossing awkward (check the details). In the first half of the nineteenth century a permanent bridge became the great project of a generation of reformers, and it did more than join two banks: it helped create the idea of a single city. This chapter follows the Chain Bridge, the other bridges that followed it, and the neoclassical Pest that grew up around them. Names, dates and attributions are given from general knowledge and flagged where they should be checked.

The Reform Era and Széchenyi

The decades before 1848 are known in Hungarian history as the reform era. Landowners, writers and politicians argued for modernising a largely agricultural kingdom: banking, trade, river navigation, a national academy. István Széchenyi, a count and one of the most energetic of these reformers, is the figure most closely tied to the bridge (check the details of his role). He is also associated with the founding of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and with steamship navigation on the Danube. The bridge was part of a wider argument that Hungary should be connected, in trade and in ideas, to the rest of Europe.

The Chain Bridge

Adam Clark also oversaw the tunnel under Castle Hill, which opened a few years after the bridge and links the bridge to the river road on the other side (check the date). Bridge and tunnel together form one piece of planning: a crossing on one side and a way through the hill on the other.

One City from Three

In 1873 Buda, Óbuda and Pest were united as a single city (check the date). The bridge did not cause this, but it made the idea practical, and the union gave the new capital the scale it needed for the Millennium building of the 1890s (Chapter 6). Several other bridges followed over the next decades.

Neoclassical Pest

As Pest grew, its public buildings were often built in the neoclassical style, with columns, pediments and plain, well-proportioned façades. The architects usually named are Mihály Pollack, who designed the Hungarian National Museum, and József Hild, who worked on large churches including the cathedrals at Eger and Esztergom (check the attributions and dates). It is a calm, orderly style, which suited a reforming city that wanted to look modern and civic.

Destruction and Rebuilding

In the winter of 1944 to 1945 the German forces retreating from Budapest blew up the city's bridges, including the Chain Bridge (check the details). The war damaged the city badly, and the bridges were rebuilt in the following years. The Chain Bridge reopened in 1949, a hundred years after its first opening (check the date), and the other bridges were rebuilt over a longer period. Some were rebuilt as close copies and some in a new form, which is a question the final chapter returns to.

Exercises

Next chapter: The Millennium Capital: Parliament, the Opera and Andrássy Avenue, which covers the celebrations of 1896 and the buildings made for them.