Hess András tér
From the Bastion Promenade we return to Szent- háromság tér. Hess András
tér adjoins Szentháromság tér
to north. This little square bears all the
characteristics of the Castle District. On its eastern side, near the Church of
Our Lady, stands the Budapest Hilton hotel. The southern façade of the modern
building completed in 1976 has preserved the Baroque and Louis XVI style of an
old school building dating from the end of the eighteenth century. In the axis
of the hotel stands the base of a tower decorated with magnificent
curtain-arched windows, above which once rose the tower of the Dominican
monastery, built in the thirteenth-fifteenth centuries.
In the western wall there is a copy of the King Matthias (mpeg !) statue of Bautzen.
In the open courtyard of the southern wing the ground- walls of the one-time
monastery can be seen. From the bastion a view opens into the aisle of the
one-time chapel, which is the scene of open-air musical performances in summer.
The house at No. 3 Hess András tér was rebuilt in the early eighteenth
century on thirteenth-century foundations; in 1760 it housed the Red Hedgehog
(Vörös Sün) Inn, as can still be seen on the carved stone inn-sign above the
gate. It was here that in the eighteenth century the first theatrical
performances in Buda were held. The house at No. 4. facing the hotel was formed
by joining together the remains of three fourteenth-century houses.
The first book printed in Hungary, the Chronica Hungarorum, was produced
here in 1473 by the printer András Hess. Behind the neo- Classic exteriors of
the house, richly decorated Gothic niches with seats, door frames and
barrel-vaulted halls were revealed after the Second World War. Today it houses
the Fortuna restaurant, a visitor to which finds himself in authentic medieval
surroundings. In the centre of the square stands a statue of Pope Innocent XI,
erected in memory of the pontiff's appeal in 1686 for a Christian league to
liberate Buda.