Walking down from Gellért Hill
Walking down from Gellért Hill towards Elizabeth
Bridge, we come to the statue of Bishop St. Gerard
(Gellért) standing on the hillside. It was at this spot
that the Venetian missionary died a martyr's death
early in the eleventh century. In the little district of
Tabán, which lies at the northern foot of Gellért Hill
and consist of only a few streets, the beautiful eighteenth-century
Baroque St. Catherine Church and the
fifteenth-century Rác (Imre) baths are the most out-
standing monuments. At the Buda end of the Elizabeth
Bridge the domed building of the Rudas Baths
dating from Turkish times is worth attention. From the
Middle Ages up to the 1930s this was a densely populated
district with hundreds of small houses. Here lived
the men who built the Danube ferry-boats, the ferry-
men and the coach-men; the vineyard-workers came
to live here and later it became a Turkish settlement.
A large park has taken the place of the houses which
were pulled down. Before leaving the Tabán district
and going on to the
Chain Bridge
along the chestnut
avenue running northwards on the Danube bank, let us
stop for a minute in front of the house at No.1-3 Apród
utca, which is now the Museum of Medical History.
(The stairs to the Palace Museum start from here.) In
this eighteenth-century building was born-and is
buried-Ignác Semmelweis (1818-1865), one of the
pioneers of the fight against puerperal fever.