St Stephen's Basilica Treasury, Budapest

St Stephens Basilica has a treasury, where they keep all the precious objects. This is a replica of St Stephens Crown, which has been made in porcelain. The workmanship is fabulous. My photography is less so!





These monstrances, gifts from abroad, are all pretty amazing.

Budapest Gresham Palace

The Gresham Palace Hotel building was built by and for a British Insurance Company between 1904 and 1906, and was their Budapest office, residential apartments and shopping arcades. It is a stunning example of an At Nouveau building, which was badly damaged during the second world war, then allowed to slowly deteriorate. It has been lovingly restored and converted into a luxury hotel by the Four Seasons Hotel group, with support from the Hungarian government.



The imposing exterior of the hotel, as seen from the Chain Bridge. Remember you can click on the photographs to enlarge them - this building has many small details that are hard to see unless you do!
This balcony is to the right of the entrance, there are beautiful carved stone decorations, small touches of gold, and mini mosaics all over the building.

Here is a closer view of the front of the building, from street level. Below is are a few examples of the mini mosaics around the ground floor windows - each window has a different pattern.




There are also metal decorative elements on the front of the building, as shown below.


The two pictures below are of the plaques and stone sculptural elements at the left and right of the entrance to the hotel, just before you enter.




When you have entered the hotel, and look back at the entrance, you can clearly see the fabulous ironwork and glass panels which separate the outer 'porch' from the foyer proper. There are at least 3 of these ironwork panels - this one, plus one at the end of each ground floor wing.

This is a plaque in the foyer, explaining who built the building, and why. There is one in Hungarian on the opposite wall.


In the foyer directly in front of you as you enter, is the most fabulous light fitting. This is several feet from top to bottom - my memory is hazy, but between 3 and 4 feet, I think.



This is the hotel foyer, the main reception is to the right of the picture, the floor is all mosaic, the walls are all tiled, every other tile has a Nouveau design in relief. You can see the fabulous ironwork designs at the end of the wing of the hotel.


The hotel foyer and ground floor is very light and airy, and when you look up, you realise why - the ceilings in the foyer and two wings are glass, with more beautiful designs built into them.


These doors are stunning, I have no idea where they lead - perhaps a grand ball room? Or the stairs?


Some detail of the wall tiles and wall light fittings.


They have even had planters made with mosaic decorations to match the floor.


These are the chandeliers in a side room off the foyer, there was another reception desk here.


There was also a small bar, with a front made of lovely bespoke glass panels.


We wandered from the bar into a lounge area, which was very splendid. Apparently, when the building was built, this wing was a shopping arcade, and the rooms off to the sides were small shops.

We decided that we would pretend to be rich for half an hour, so asked for the drinks menu.

We hope our shock at the prices didn't show on our faces, but we decided to go for it, and ordered a coffee and a hot apple cider - at £5/$7.50US each.... the drinks came with two tiny petit fours each - which were lovely. The hot apple cider was obviously hand made, and came with a cinnamon stick.



We made the drinks last for half an hour, and just enjoyed looking at the building, including a close inspection of the panel at the end of the lounge.


Even the floral arrangements inside the hotel were very chic and stunning!

If you want to see more (and better) pictures of the hotel, the Four Seasons group have some gorgeous images on their website:

http://www.fourseasons.com/budapest/photos_and_videos/

Budapest central market

I went to Budapest last weekend. I took over 400 photographs while I was there. I thought I'd post blog entries place by place. Early on our first morning in Budapest, we went to the central market hall, which is in Pest (Buda and Pest were separate cities divided by the River Danube until around 100 years ago). The market hall is a splendid building which is much more brightly coloured than my photos taken on a very dull day make it look. The roof tiles are all lovely colours.


Remember that if you click on the pictures, you can see a larger image.


The interior of the building is light and airy, and was full of Saturday shoppers...


We began with breakfast. I have always believed that you should have whatever the locals are having, so we had an unusual breakfast (for us) of bratwurst, paprika sausage and chips. It was 9.20 am so I didn't have the red wine that everybody else seemed to be drinking...


The upstairs area of the market was full of stalls selling souvenirs, folk costumes and lace, leather goods, clothes, toys and such like. These decorated 'Faberge' style eggs were beautiful.


This lace was originally hand made, I don't know if it still is. Budapest is is the only place where I have seen such brightly coloured motifs worked in the lace.


This stall was selling Russian dolls of all shapes, styles and sizes. Some of them were a little odd (terrorist & pop star themed dolls) but most were absolutely beautiful. There were also some really lovely hand carved 'St Nicholas' figures ranging from about 6 inches tall to about 15 inches tall, but I could see the stall holder wasn't too happy with me taking photos of his stall, so I moved on....


These were some of the traditional costume pieces on display.


We moved down to the ground floor, where all manner of food was on sale. There were many spice/paprika stalls, and the displays were beautiful. They all has strings of dried paprika peppers and garlic cloves hanging form their stalls.


Here's a smaller one, where I bought a bag of sweet paprika powder.


Even the organic veg stall had strings of paprika and garlic, this time alternated on the strings. The prices are in HUF (Hungarian Forints), of which there are around 300 to the £ or 222 to the $US.


This was a stall which sold biscuits and cakes....


The way they stack the fruit and veg high made it all look very attractive, but they must have a rapid turnover to have so much stock at any time - not a single item in the whole market looked even slightly 'tired' or wrinkly!


Goose and goose liver are common on Hungarian restaurant menus, so I shouldn't have been surprised to see Goose liver pate on sale in the market. This is also known as 'foie gras' and the methods of producing it are something I cannot agree with, so no matter how good it may be, I won't buy or eat it.


There were lots of sausage, salami & smoked meat stalls in the market, and again the sheer quantity of stock on display is quite different from most British market stalls.


If you are squeamish about animals or meat, perhaps you should stop here.


I was amazed that the meat stalls seemed to be species specific. In Britain, a butcher or market stall selling meat will sell all kinds of meat. In Budapest market, there were many stalls selling either pork meat or chicken meat, but I didn't see any other meats. The pork stalls sold the whole pig - in parts. Here in the UK, it is becoming harder and harder to find anything other than the 'best cuts' of meat, which is a shame because some of the cheaper cuts and offal make much tastier meals if cooked well.

This was a typical pork meat stall. The trader had similar quantities of meat to what i would expect to see in a British market or butcher shop.


This is what most of the stalls were like - meat piled high, but in a very neat and tidy way! There were snouts, ears, pieces of skin (to make crackling?), sides of belly pork, racks of ribs, trotters, offal, cheeks - everything except the oink!



And this stall had all of the above, plus a sucking pig.


This was the most bizarre moment in the market - we looked up and discovered that Margaret Thatcher had been here before us, and the stallholder was so proud of the visit, that he'd had a photograph englarged and displayed above his stall!!!