There was once a Hotel Dunapalota

One of Budapest's most glamorous hotels has a legendary history: at the end of the Second World War, when the guns were blazing in our capital and the Red Army had already reached the Great Boulevard (Nagykörút), the waiters served the remaining food (caviar, "rizibizi" -Hungarian for rice and peas- and French wine) to the residents of the surrounding houses and the retreating German and Hungarian officers with their usual elegance, silver platters and crystal glasses. In this exhibition we recall the history of this famous hotel, Hotel Dunapalota.

Palace on the Danube Corso

Between 1862 and 1866, the southern section of the Pest Quay was widened at the expense of the Danube, and the first building on the northern part of the resulting Danube Corso was commissioned by Náthán Stein, who was the father of the Hungarian-born Orientalist Aurél Stein (1862-1943). The four-storey palace, ending in six truncated pyramid, was designed by the famous Hungarian palace architect Antal Gottgeb.

Stein sold the property to the Hungarian-French Insurance Company Ltd. in 1891. However, the insurance company could not finance it for long, so in 1895 the complex was resold to József Illits, a major entrepreneur who also operated other hotels on the Danube Bank in Pest (Grand Hotel Hungária, Bristol, Carlton), and in 1909, through the intervention of Pál Szapáry, he eventually sold the building to the Ritz Hotel Development Company in London.

Grand Hotel Ritz

The British hotel chain reconstructed the building between 1910-13 to the designs of architects Sándor Fellner and Aladár Sós. The building was extended to five storeys, and in addition to 120 heated and cooled suites, it also included a reading room, banqueting room, conservatory, two restaurants and cafés, bar, grill room and a roof terrace with stunning panoramic views. The roof terrace was also accessible by three different lifts, where live music was performed every evening for a national and international audience. Regular guests included members of parliament and landowners.

Remarkably, the statue of Baron József Eötvös standing in front of the hotel was made by Adolf Huszár in 1879, the pedestal was made by Miklós Ybl and Jakab Kauser. The square acquired its presen tcobblestone covering about a hundred years later, in 1981.

Three years after opening, the Ritz went bankrupt due to the recession caused by the First World War. The building, with its stunning panoramic views, quickly found a new owner: Anton Dreher (son of Antal Dreher), the famous brewer, bought it in 1916 and operated it as Hotel Dunapalota.

Famous Guests of Hotel Dunapalota

A regular guest of the Dunapalota was Count József Pálffy, Member of Parliament, who had miraculously survived the railway bomb attack in Biatorbágy carried out by Szilveszter Matuska. In 1935, the Prince of Wales, later Edward VIII, King of Great Britain and Ireland, Emperor of India, stayed in this hotel. One of the hotel's luxury suites was rented by Rabindranath Tagore, the famous Nobel Prize-winning Indian poet and writer, the eponym of the Balatonfüred promenade, during his medical treatments in Hungary. The banqueting hall was a regular haunt of famous writers, poets and journalists of the Horthy era, including Zsigmond Móricz, Elek Magyar, Gyula Krúdy and Árpád Tóth. The famous restaurateur Károly Gundel, the founder of the Gundel restaurant and eponym od Gundel crêpe, was a frequent guest at the Café de Paris on the ground floor.

A fatal (bomb)hit

As mentioned in the introduction, the hotel continued to operate during the Second World War. Until a fateful day on 15 January 1945, when it was hit by a so-called chain bomb. Chain bombs were attached to each other by a chain mechanism which, when released, avoided the effects of air currents and fell on the target simultaneously and close together, causing maximum destruction. The charges destroyed equipment on the upper floors of the building and broke windows. The remaining belongings were taken away by the soviet occupiers or local robber gangs during the chaotic weeks after the siege.

The remains of the building were finally cleared away in 1947. In contemporary photos, apart from the collapse of parts of the roof slab and fire damage, the building seems to have survived the siege almost intact. Unfortunately, however, it was so structurally unstable that it could not be cost-effectively recovered. The Party leadership therefore decided to demolish and rebuild. After the demolition, the site was left undeveloped for a long time due to lack of funds, and was reopened in 1981 as the Forum Hotel in a building designed by József Finta, later renamed the Hotel Duna Intercontinental. Nowadays, the Duna-Korzó, one of the most beautiful World Heritage sites in Budapest, is slowly regaining its original monarchy atmosphere.