The Rudas Baths

Behind this plain façade lies a space more than four hundred and fifty years old where people still sit in the water every day. At its centre is an octagonal pool under a dome ten metres across, carried on eight columns, with small openings in the dome where the light falls in streaks through the steam.

Long before the Ottomans arrived, the Knights of St John already had a hospital with a bathhouse here, because the warm water rises from the ground on this spot all by itself. Sokollu Mustafa, the most powerful pasha Buda ever knew, had it rebuilt between 1566 and 1572 in the form you still see today. The Turks called it the bath with the green column, after a column no one has ever found again, though there are green stones set into the walls. The name Rudas probably comes from the Serbs and Bosnians in the neighbourhood next door, who called it their mineral bath.

Since then there has barely been a single year it closed its doors. From 1936 this pool was reserved for men on almost every day, who went in wearing a cotton apron tied around them, and that is where its Hungarian nickname comes from: the apron bath.

We follow the road further north, towards the steps and arches set against the slope of the palace.