Széchenyi

If one bath stands for Budapest, it is the Széchenyi, a yellow Neo-Baroque palace in the City Park with steaming outdoor pools in front of it. It is one of the largest bath complexes in Europe (check) and is on many visitors' lists. This chapter covers how it came to be, the well that supplies it, the building, the pools, and how it is used today. Names, dates and figures are from general knowledge and flagged for checking. Nothing here is medical advice.

A Bath in Pest

Most of the springs of Budapest are on the Buda side of the Danube. Pest, the flat eastern half, had no natural hot spring close to the surface, so a bath in the City Park (Városliget) needed a deep well (see Chapter 1). The idea of a large bath there was raised in the later nineteenth century, as the park and the city developed, and the engineer Vilmos Zsigmondy is the name usually linked to the drilling (check the details).

• The well. Drilling began in the 1860s or 1870s and reached hot water at a depth of over a thousand metres (check the dates, the depth and the temperature). It took years, and the first well was followed by a second later (check).
• The water. It is hot, mineral-rich, and used both in the pools and for drinking cures (check the composition, see Chapter 8).
• The name. The bath is named after Count István Széchenyi, the nineteenth-century reformer, though the connection is a naming tribute (check).

The Building

The main building was designed by Győző Czigler, and after his death completed by Ede Dvorák and Ádám Kiss, opening in 1913 (check the architects and the year). It is in a Neo-Baroque style, with a central dome, ornate facades and a courtyard planned around outdoor pools. See Hungarian Architecture for the style and the architects. Later extensions in the twentieth century added more pools and treatment rooms (check).

The Chess Players

A well-known image of Széchenyi is the group of men playing chess on floating boards in the warm outdoor pool. This is a local habit that tourists have discovered (check the history of the custom). It shows the bath as a social space as well as a place of treatment, one of the three lenses of Chapter 1.

How It Works Today

• Visitors. A mixture of tourists and local regulars, and large crowds at weekends and in summer (check).
• Evenings. The baths hold special party nights in some seasons, a development of the last few decades (see Chapter 9 and check the current practice).
• Ownership. The complex is in public hands and run by a city-owned company (check the current operator).
• Rules. Details of tickets, lockers, swimwear and caps are covered in Chapter 7. Opening times and prices change and are not given here.

Exercises